Measuring the impact of innovative human capital on small firms' propensity to innovate

The ability to identify and evaluate the competitive advantage of employees' transferable and innovative characteristics is of importance to firms and policymakers. This research extends the standard measure of human capital by developing a unique and far reaching concept of Innovative Human Capital and emphasises its effect on small firm innovation and hence growth (jobs, sales and productivity). This new Innovative Human Capital concept encapsulates four elements: education, training, willingness to change in the workplace and job satisfaction to overcome the limitations of measurements used previously. An augmented innovation production function is used to test the hypothesis that small firms who employ managers with Innovative Human Capital are more likely to innovate. There is evidence from the results that Innovative Human Capital may be more valuable to small firms (i.e. less than 50 employees) than larger-sized firms (i.e. more than 50 employees). The research expands innovation theory to include the concept of Innovative Human Capital as a competitive advantage and determinant of small firm innovation; and distinguishes Innovative Human Capital as a significant concept to consider when creating public support programmes for small firms.

Developing a tool to support communication of parental concerns when a child is in hospital

The involvement of parents in their child’s hospital care has been strongly advocated in paediatric healthcare policy and practice. However, incorporating parental worries about their child’s condition into clinical care can be difficult for both parents and healthcare professionals. Through our “Listening To You” quality improvement project we developed and piloted an innovative approach to listening, incorporating and responding to parental concerns regarding their child’s condition when in hospital. Here we describe the phases of work undertaken to develop our “Listening To You” communications bundle, including a survey, literature review and consultation with parents and staff, before findings from the project evaluation are presented and discussed.

Frontline employees’ innovative service behavior as key to customer loyalty:insights into FLEs’ resource gain spiral

Many service firms require frontline service employees (FLEs) to follow routines and standardized operating procedures during the service encounter, to deliver consistently high service standards. However, to create superior, pleasurable experiences for customers, featuring both helpful services and novel approaches to meeting their needs, firms in various sectors also have begun to encourage FLEs to engage in more innovative service behaviors. This study therefore investigates a new and complementary route to customer loyalty, beyond the conventional service-profit chain, that moves through FLEs' innovative service behavior. Drawing on conservation of resources (COR) theory, this study introduces a resource gain spiral at the service encounter, which runs from FLEs' emotional job engagement to innovative service behavior, and then leads to customer delight and finally customer loyalty. In accordance with COR theory, the proposed model also includes factors that might hinder (customer aggression, underemployment) or foster (colleague support, supervisor support) FLEs' resource gain spiral. A multilevel analysis of a large-scale, dyadic data set that contains responses from both FLEs and customers in multiple industries strongly supports the proposed resource gain spiral as a complementary route to customer loyalty. The positive emotional job engagement-innovative service behavior relationship is undermined by customer aggression and underemployment, as hypothesized. Surprisingly though, and contrary to the hypotheses, colleague and supervisor support do not seem to foster FLEs' resource gain spiral. Instead, colleague support weakens the engagement-innovative service behavior relationship, and supervisor support does not affect it. These results indicate that if FLEs can solicit resources from other sources, they may not need to invest as many of their individual resources. In particular, colleague support even appears to serve as a substitute for FLEs' individual resource investments in the resource gain spiral.

FOCUS : frailty management optimisation through EIPAHA commitments and utilisation of stakeholders’ input – an innovative European project in elderly care

The goal of FOCUS, which stands for Frailty Management Optimization through EIPAHA Commitments and Utilization of Stakeholders’ Input, is to reduce the burden of frailty in Europe. The partners are working on advancing knowledge of frailty detection, assessment, and management, including biological, clinical, cognitive and psychosocial markers, in order to change the paradigm of frailty care from acute intervention to prevention. FOCUS partners are working on ways to integrate the best available evidence from frailty-related screening tools, epidemiological and interventional studies into the care of frail people and their quality of life. Frail citizens in Italy, Poland and the UK and their caregivers are being called to express their views and their experiences with treatments and interventions aimed at improving quality of life. The FOCUS Consortium is developing pathways to leverage the knowledge available and to put it in the service of frail citizens. In order to reach out to the broadest audience possible, the FOCUS Platform for Knowledge Exchange and the platform for Scaling Up are being developed with the collaboration of stakeholders. The FOCUS project is a development of the work being done by the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing (EIPAHA), which aims to increase the average healthy lifespan in Europe by 2020 while fostering sustainability of health/social care systems and innovation in Europe. The knowledge and tools developed by the FOCUS project, with input from stakeholders, will be deployed to all EIPAHA participants dealing with frail older citizens to support activities and optimize performance.