The healthcare industry is under pressure to improve performance across strategic measures of performance, including delivery cost, operating revenue, employee engagement, patient safety, patient experience, and patient outcomes. A growing number of organizations turn to innovation as a way to survive and succeed in this new healthcare environment. Although many definitions exist for innovation, I like to define it as “the deliberate effort by an organization to find new ways for meeting business challenges.”

Idea campaigns and idea games are two powerful methods for launching an innovation journey in your healthcare organization. Unlike innovation efforts in command-and-control organizations, where ideas can only come from managers or a select few “experts,” these campaigns and games are idea-generation approaches that democratize the innovation process and allow every employee to participate.

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