Lean in healthcare - Breaking the trade-off between service and efficiency

Abstract

Against the background of the current ‘technology goes economic market’ focus of mainstream innovation research, this editorial introduces contributions to a special issue explicitly devoted to the corresponding research gap: non-technological and non-economic innovations are indeed hardly explored, even approaches focussing on non-technological or social innovations still have a strong bias towards the economy. In contrast to both the mainstream and these alternative approaches to innovation, the editorial outlines a concept of socially robust innovations, i.e., innovations that have impact on both economic and non-economic spheres of society, and that can therefore be supposed to be more profitable in terms of, again, both economic and non-economic profit.