How can the adult social care sector develop, scale and spread innovations? A review of the literature from an organisational perspective

Innovation in adult social care (ASC) is unevenly distributed across the sector, areas and organisations. This raises important questions about what enables some organisations or areas to innovate more successfully and how far their successes can be replicated. One stream of literature argues that organisational capabilities are critical for successful innovation. Organisational capabilities can be conceptualised as the collective knowledge, skills and expertise of the people in the organisation. Using this understanding of organisational capabilities, we conducted a literature review to answer the question, ‘what are the range of capabilities organisations need for successfully developing, scaling and spreading innovations and how can these capabilities be grown or developed in the ASC context?’ Through a systematic approach to searching the literature and evaluating the studies, the review identified a corpus of articles which informed our understanding of the capabilities required for innovation in the ASC sector. The review arrived at five themes, or clusters, of capabilities that were associated with innovation in the ASC sector. These were: collaboration, leadership, knowledge, resources and culture. The collaboration theme was particularly strong and linked with aspects of the leadership theme (i.e. collaborative leadership) and the culture theme (i.e. inter- and intraorganisational shared culture). We also found some examples of models, concepts and practices which were argued to support the building of capabilities needed for innovation and were sometimes specific to the innovation and its context. Examples included the Alliance model for relational contracting, boundary spanning, “active conversations” and appointed champions. The review also revealed that much innovation was introduced through projects which had implications both for the capabilities needed to manage the work process, but also the associated cliff-edges in funding. Finally, an important lesson from this review is that the ASC community needs to become better at learning from innovation, and that this requires a step-change in how innovation is studied, that is, more comparative and longitudinal studies of innovation that engage with relevant theories from the wider innovation and management literature.