Building Innovation Capacity in Pedeatric Healthcare Practice through Design-Thinking: Converting the Public Sector Innovation Lab model into Action with KidsAbility

Public healthcare organizations continuously struggle to innovate and respond to complex societal challenges and the evolving needs of society. Given the inherent risk and uncertainty associated with translating new innovations into practice, public healthcare organizations face severe challenges on transferring new knowledge of innovations from research into practice. This has led to a “quality gap” between what we know medical care should deliver and what Canadian patients receive. In the wake of this constant evolution, new investment into building innovation capacity in Canada’s public sector healthcare organizations is warranted. In partnership with KidsAbility, the purpose of this project is to inform the design and deployment of a public sector innovation (PSI) lab to be operationalized by the partner organization- KidsAbility with the goal of improving the efficacy of which research-based healthcare innovations are translated into practice. Supporting KidsAbility in their mission to improve the quality of pediatric healthcare practice throughout Waterloo Region, this project will develop a Public Sector Innovation (PSI) Lab suited to the Canadian healthcare context. By documenting key innovation barriers and opportunities in healthcare practice, this project will identify key design factors that position KidsAbility to more effectively identify and implement research-based innovations into healthcare practice. Through the co-production of the PSI lab, this project provides a platform that KidsAbility can use the PSI lab model explore new opportunities to generate, prototype, and implement Canadian made innovations that lead to improved healthcare quality.

Faculty Supervisor:

Jeffrey Wilson

Student:

Partner:

KidsAbility

Discipline:

Business

Sector:

Health and Related Sciences & Technology

University:

University of Waterloo

Program: