1. Get the full ebook with Bonus Features for a Better Reading Experience on ebookgate.com
Innovation and the Creative Process Lars Fuglsang
https://ebookgate.com/product/innovation-and-the-creative-
process-lars-fuglsang/
OR CLICK HERE
DOWLOAD NOW
Download more ebook instantly today at https://ebookgate.com
2. Instant digital products (PDF, ePub, MOBI) available
Download now and explore formats that suit you...
Transformational Innovation in the Creative and Cultural
Industries 1st Edition Alison Rieple
https://ebookgate.com/product/transformational-innovation-in-the-
creative-and-cultural-industries-1st-edition-alison-rieple/
ebookgate.com
Innovation in the Cultural and Creative Industries 1st
Edition Estelle Pellegrin-Boucher
https://ebookgate.com/product/innovation-in-the-cultural-and-creative-
industries-1st-edition-estelle-pellegrin-boucher/
ebookgate.com
Methodology Technology and Innovation in Translation
Process Research 1st Edition Fabio Alves
https://ebookgate.com/product/methodology-technology-and-innovation-
in-translation-process-research-1st-edition-fabio-alves/
ebookgate.com
The Creative Process in Music from Mozart to Kurtag 1st
Edition Edition William Kinderman
https://ebookgate.com/product/the-creative-process-in-music-from-
mozart-to-kurtag-1st-edition-edition-william-kinderman/
ebookgate.com
3. Play and the artist s creative process the work of Philip
Guston and Eduardo Paolozzi 1st Edition Elly Thomas
https://ebookgate.com/product/play-and-the-artist-s-creative-process-
the-work-of-philip-guston-and-eduardo-paolozzi-1st-edition-elly-
thomas/
ebookgate.com
Joyce s Creative Process and the Construction of
Characters in Ulysses Becoming the Blooms 1st Edition Luca
Crispi
https://ebookgate.com/product/joyce-s-creative-process-and-the-
construction-of-characters-in-ulysses-becoming-the-blooms-1st-edition-
luca-crispi/
ebookgate.com
Prophet of innovation Joseph Schumpeter and creative
destruction 1st Harvard University Press ed Edition
Schumpeter
https://ebookgate.com/product/prophet-of-innovation-joseph-schumpeter-
and-creative-destruction-1st-harvard-university-press-ed-edition-
schumpeter/
ebookgate.com
Creative Problem Solving for Managers Developing Skills
for Decision Making and Innovation 2nd Edition Tony
Proctor
https://ebookgate.com/product/creative-problem-solving-for-managers-
developing-skills-for-decision-making-and-innovation-2nd-edition-tony-
proctor/
ebookgate.com
The Web Designer s Roadmap Your Creative Process for Web
Design Success 1st Edition Giovanni Difeterici
https://ebookgate.com/product/the-web-designer-s-roadmap-your-
creative-process-for-web-design-success-1st-edition-giovanni-
difeterici/
ebookgate.com
7. NEW HORIZONS IN THE ECONOMICS OF INNOVATION
Founding Editor: Christopher Freeman, Emeritus Professor of Science Policy, SPRU –
Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Sussex, UK
Technical innovation is vital to the competitive performance of firms and of nations and
for the sustained growth of the world economy. The economics of innovation is an area
that has expanded dramatically in recent years and this major series, edited by one of the
most distinguished scholars in the field, contributes to the debate and advances in
research in this most important area.
The main emphasis is on the development and application of new ideas. The series
provides a forum for original research in technology, innovation systems and management,
industrial organization, technological collaboration, knowledge and innovation, research
and development, evolutionary theory and industrial strategy. International in its approach,
the series includes some of the best theoretical and empirical work from both well-
established researchers and the new generation of scholars.
Titles in the series include:
Technological Systems and Intersectoral Innovation Flows
Riccardo Leoncini and Sandro Montresor
Inside the Virtual Product
How Organisations Create Knowledge Through Software
Luciana D’Adderio
Embracing the Knowledge Economy
The Dynamic Transformation of the Finnish Innovation System
Edited by Gerd Schienstock
The Dynamics of Innovation in Eastern Europe
Lessons from Estonia
Per Högselius
Technology and the Decline in Demand for Unskilled Labour
A Theoretical Analysis of the US and European Labour Markets
Mark Sanders
Innovation and Institutions
A Multidisciplinary Review of the Study of Innovation Systems
Edited by Steven Casper and Frans van Waarden
Innovation Strategies in Interdependent States
Essays on Smaller Nations, Regions and Cities in a Globalized World
John de la Mothe
Internationalizing the Internet
The Co-evolution of Influence and Technology
Byung-Keun Kim
Asia’s Innovation Systems in Transition
Edited by Bengt-Åke Lundvall, Patarapong Intarakumnerd and Jan Vang-Lauridsen
National Innovation, Indicators and Policy
Edited by Louise Earl and Fred Gault
Innovation and the Creative Process
Towards Innovation with Care
Edited by Lars Fuglsang
8. Innovation and the
Creative Process
Towards Innovation with Care
Edited by
Lars Fuglsang
Department of Communication, Business and Information
Technologies (CBIT), Roskilde University, Denmark
NEW HORIZONS IN THE ECONOMICS OF INNOVATION
Edward Elgar
Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA
10. Contents
List of figures vii
List of tables viii
List of boxes ix
List of contributors x
Foreword xiv
Jon Sundbo
INTRODUCTION
1. Innovation with care: what it means 3
Lars Fuglsang
PART 1: INVOLVEMENT
2. Innovation and involvement in services 25
Jon Sundbo
3. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as innovation:
taking care of the right customers 48
Jan Mattsson
4. Innovation with care in health care: translation as an
alternative metaphor of innovation and change 57
John Damm Scheuer
PART 2: IMPORTANCE
5. The public library between social engineering and
innovation with care 87
Lars Fuglsang
6. Getting waste to become taste: from the planning of
innovation to innovation planning 112
Gestur Hovgaard
7. Public innovation with care: a quantitative approach 131
Lars Fuglsang, Jeppe Højland and John Storm Pedersen
v
11. 8. Meta-innovations on strategic arenas: innovative
management in public organizations 142
Jørn Kjølseth Møller
PART 3: POSITIONING
9. The interaction between public science and industry, and the
role of the Øresund Science Region’s platform organization 169
Povl A. Hansen and Göran Serin
10. The role of a network organization and Internet-based
technologies in clusters: the case of Medicon Valley 193
Ada Scupola and Charles Steinfield
11. The “Mad Max Puzzle”: positioning and the lone inventor 212
Jerome Davis and Lee N. Davis
PART 4: SENSEMAKING
12. Sense caring in innovation 237
Peter Hagedorn-Rasmussen
13. Making innovation durable 254
Connie Svabo
14. Intrapreneurship: differences in innovations is a matter of
perspective and understanding 275
Hanne Westh Nicolajsen
15. Mindful innovation 295
Poul Bitsch Olsen
Index 311
vi Contents
12. Figures
8.1. System of innovation on the domain for educational
services in Denmark (kindergartens and services for care
of children) 154
8.2. Diversity and capability to innovate 159
8.3. Organizational cultures 161
9.1. The Øresund Science Region 180
11.1. Initial positioning: Mad Max and Big Widget Inc. 215
11.2. Mad Max and Big Widget Inc. The impact of expectations 217
11.3. Time line one: two-step sequencing 219
11.4. Time line two: multiple step sequencing 219
13.1. Communication (a) 270
13.2. Communication (b) 270
14.1. The innovation process of ProjectWeb 281
14.2. Screen dump from ProjectWeb (IT department) 282
14.3. Innovation-in-use? 283
vii
13. Tables
4.1. Quantitative and qualitative approach to quality
development 71
7.1. Innovation in public institutions 134
7.2. The proxy of innovation with care 135
7.3. Innovation and fulfillment of external demands 136
7.4. Innovation and strategic involvement 137
8.1. Institutional pressures on educational organizations 145
8.2. Examples of strategic arenas in educational organizations
(kindergartens) 149
8.3. Characteristic of networks as a potential and as action
(intention) 162
10.1. Characteristics of Medicon Valley (adapted from the MVA
home page, www.mva.org) 202
11.1. Chronology: Kearns v. Ford re: the intermittent windshield
wiper 226
14.1. ProjectWeb content and sense-making conditions across
projects 289
viii
14. Boxes
8.1. Types of innovations and innovation strategies in the
public sector 151
8.2. Five roles in the management of innovation 158
12.1. The products offered – and a taste of the unfolding
innovation 244
12.2. The e-realtors’ four IT platforms 246
15.1. Definition of mindfulness 300
ix
15. Contributors
Jerome Davis is currently Canadian Research Chair (Oil and Natural Gas
Policy) at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. He has published
widely in the fields of oil and natural gas policy, and in diverse fields such
as equity markets as institutions, the institutional consequences of incom-
plete contracts, project management and analysis, public sector restructur-
ing, and the role of prizes as incentives to innovation.
Lee N. Davis is Associate Professor at the Department of Industrial
Economics and Strategy, and Research Associate at the Centre on Law,
Economics and Financial Institutions, both at the Copenhagen Business
School. She has conducted research on economic incentives to research and
development over the past two decades, with a special focus on the role of
intellectual property rights, and published widely in the field. Other research
interests include firm appropriability choices, innovation strategy, and aca-
demic patenting in the life sciences.
Lars Fuglsang (PhD) is Associate Professor in Social Sciences at the
Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies
(CBIT) at Roskilde University. He has written books and articles in the field
of innovation studies, public innovation, service development, and science
and technology studies. His research explores how organizational frame-
works are created to deal with the impact of innovation and technology on
business and society.
Peter Hagedorn-Rasmussen (PhD) is Associate Professor of Social
Sciences at the Department of Communication, Business and Information
Technologies (CBIT) at Roskilde University. He has written books and
articles in the field of organizational change, management and work life
studies. His main research interest is the study of organizations as living
compromises, with particular focus on the relationship between manage-
ment and work life.
Povl A. Hansen is Dr fil. in Economy History from Lund University, Sweden,
and Associate Professor in Economic Geography at the Department of
Communication, Business and Information Technologies (CBIT) at Roskilde
x
16. University. He has published in the fields of technology, innovation and
regional development. His research is in the field of industrial analysis espec-
ially focusing on the relationships among innovation processes, industrial
structures and transfer of knowledge. He has published many books, reports
and articles on technology, business conditions and regional development.
Jeppe Højland is a doctoral student of Social Sciences at the Department
of Communication, Business and Information Technologies (CBIT) at
Roskilde University. His PhD dissertation is about new kinds of reward
practices in knowledge-intensive firms. He has written an article about the
impact on leaders and employees of the Danish public sector reform. His
main research interest is innovation within the area of human resource
management.
Gestur Hovgaard (PhD) is Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at
Roskilde University. He has written in the field of innovation and social
innovation, and his main fields of interest are within local and regional
development. Food chains and food biotechnology are also examined in his
research.
Jan Mattsson is Professor in business administration at the Department
of Communication, Business and Information Technologies (CBIT) at
Roskilde University. He has held several professorships and visiting pro-
fessorships in New Zealand, Australia and Scandinavia. He has authored
several books and more than 50 peer-reviewed international publications in
journals such as The International Journal of Research in Marketing and
Journal of Economic Psychology. He serves on many editorial boards of
international journals in marketing and services. He takes part in several
international research projects focusing on customer-firm interactions.
Jørn Kjølseth Møller (Master of Political Science) is a doctoral student of
Social Sciences at the Department of Communication, Business and
Information Technologies (CBIT) at Roskilde University. He has written
books and articles in the field of strategic management and change, service
development and psychology in organizations. His main research interest
is in strategic management and change of educational organizations in the
public sector.
Hanne Westh Nicolajsen (PhD) is Assistant Professor at the Center for
Information and Communication Technologies (CICT) at the Technical
University of Denmark. She has published in the field of the use of infor-
mation and communication technologies in organizations. Her research
Contributors xi
17. examines how information and communication technologies are used in
organizations and are shaped by organizational and entrepreneurial factors.
Poul Bitsch Olsen (PhD) is Associate Professor of Organization Theory
at the Department of Communication, Business and Information
Technologies (CBIT) at Roskilde University. He has written books and
articles on collective knowing and organizing. In particular, his research
examines leadership and project work. His research also explores how col-
lective practicing is the basis for business innovation, team-sports, value
production and academic competence.
John Storm Pedersen (PhD) is Associate Professor of Social Sciences at the
Department of Society and Globalisation at Roskilde University. He has
written books and articles in the field of public administration and man-
agement, structural reforms in the public sector and public innovation. His
main research interest at present is the impact of the structural reforms in
the public sector in Denmark and how public institutions deliver services
to the citizens. Pedersen is former CEO of the Mayor’s Office in the munici-
pality of Aalborg.
John Damm Scheuer (PhD) is Assistant Professor at the Department of
Communication, Business and Information Technologies (CBIT) at
Roskilde University. His main research interest and focus is the study of the
encounter of innovative ideas and local practice in private as well as public
organizations. The encounter is studied as implementation, diffusion or
translation processes. But also new and innovative ways of theorizing about
“the encounter” and local organizing processes are explored.
Ada Scupola (PhD) is Associate Professor at the Department of
Communication, Business and Information Technologies (CBIT), Roskilde
University. She has published articles and books in the area of information
technology innovation, especially in the field of adoption, diffusion and use
of information technologies such as e-commerce and e-services in SMEs
and industrial clusters. Her research focuses primarily on how organiza-
tional and industrial factors shape the development, adoption, implemen-
tation, use, and effects of such technologies.
Göran Serin (Dr) earned his degree in Economic History and is Associate
Professor in Business Administration at the Department of Communication,
Business and Information Technologies (CBIT), Roskilde University. He has
extensive research experience within the fields of technology, innovation and
regional development. He has a particular interest in industrial analysis and
xii Contributors
18. industrial restructuring and regional development, on which he has pub-
lished many articles and books. In recent years, his research has especially
focused on analysing regional integration in cross-border regions.
Charles Steinfield (PhD) is Professor and Chair of the Department of
Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media at Michigan State
University. He has published books and articles in the area of organizations
and use of information and communication technologies. His research
examines how individual and organizational factors shape the development,
adoption, use and effects of such technologies.
Jon Sundbo is Professor in Business Administration at the Department of
Communication, Business and Information Technologies (CBIT), Roskilde
University. He is director of the Center for Service Studies and coordinator
of the Department’s research area in innovation and change processes in
services and manufacturing. He has published extensively in the fields of
innovation, service management and the development of the service sector,
tourism and organization. He has published articles in several journals on
innovation, entrepreneurship, service and management and has authored
several books, among these The Theory of Innovation and The Strategic
Management of Innovation.
Connie Svabo (Master in Business Administration) is PhD Fellow at the
Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies
(CBIT) at Roskilde University. She has written articles and edited books
about practice-based learning. She has several years of professional expe-
rience in consultancy work and commercial writing. Her main research
interests are organization, materiality and esthetic forms of knowing.
Contributors xiii
19. Foreword
This book presents new thoughts and research on innovation. Innovation
with care emphasizes both the care for people and the care for doing inno-
vation in a proper way. Most innovative attempts fail and create economic
loss and individual disappointment.
Another book in the overwhelming stream of books on innovation? Can
it contribute with new knowledge? We believe it can by taking a primarily
sociological approach to innovation. Not that the economic aspects are
forgotten, but the sociological aspects are emphasized complimentary to
the economic ones. This is not very common in innovation literature. The
individual – the entrepreneur – has been emphasized, but rarely the social
processes with different actors and roles and innovation as an interactive
process.
In the increasing contemporary theoretical and practical interest for
innovation, the social aspects of the innovation process has often been for-
gotten. Emphasis has primarily been on economic processes and policy.
However, innovation is a process that is carried out by people in interaction
with people. It may be that the result of the process is part of the market
economy, but the process itself is a social process where the economic results
are not at all sure. Recently the social processes have come more into focus.
Innovation projects, creativity and user-involvement have become objects in
the front research. This book is one contribution to this movement.
The book is a presentation of more than 15 years of research in the
Innovation Research Group at Roskilde University in Denmark. In this
group we have had a preference for the out-of-mainstream approaches to
innovation: Innovation in services and the experience economy, innovation
as non-sophisticated, quick practical ideas, continuous incremental inno-
vation, user/customers’and employees’role in the innovation process, inno-
vation as an organizational sensemaking process and so on. This has been
amusing and informative for us and we believe it can provide new knowl-
edge for researchers, students and others interested in innovation as both
an economic and a social phenomenon.
We think that the future for the phenomenon of innovation – and thus
for innovation research and practical innovation work in firms and societies
– is to return to the original point of departure: A general change of behav-
ior and economic structures – social and economic change. We believe that
xiv
20. innovation in the future will be a much more comprehensive phenomenon
than just R&D, entrepreneurship as establishment of new high-tech firms
or narrow industrial policy. Social entrepreneurship as solving social prob-
lems, innovation as a value creating organizational development factor and
as a collective social activity in- or outside the formal economy will prob-
ably be future highlights within innovation research. This will develop inno-
vation theory and make it more exciting, but also more diffuse since it will
concern social change in general. The latter will challenge the theory devel-
opment, but there is no way around this if we want to explain economic
development, which in the future will concern phenomena such as lifestyle,
experience, corporate identity, solution of social problems and so on.
Jon Sundbo
Professor of Innovation and Business Administration
Co-ordinator of the Innovation Research Group
Roskilde University, Denmark
Foreword xv
24. 1. Innovation with care: what it means
Lars Fuglsang
The purpose of this book is to find new ways to understand and analyse
the phenomenon of innovation within the frameworks of “strategic reflex-
ivity” (Sundbo and Fuglsang, 2002; Fuglsang and Sundbo, 2005) as well as
“open innovation” (Chesbrough, 2003). The book presents new insights
into mechanisms that are important for benefiting from innovation across
sectors, organizations and people. It deals with tensions and paradoxes
in innovative activities between, for example, variety and selection, crea-
tivity and innovation, or between business innovation and social innova-
tion – rather than seeing innovation from one particular point of view.
“Innovation with care” means that innovation is seen as something that
takes place among many actors having different perspectives, ideas and cul-
tures that have to be carefully woven together in order to achieve the
benefits of innovation.
We understand innovation as an interactive process that involves many
people and often also changing people across sectors. Innovation is there-
fore a common activity, which is not restricted to special groups of persons
such as “the creative class”or “symbol analysts”or people working in R&D
labs. Innovation is a process that increasingly engages ideas and opinions
from many different people. These are opinions and ideas that have to be
expressed but also selected and aggregated. Innovation requires diversity
and collectivity at the same time, and the balance between the two is a
crucial aspect of innovative activities today. This balance is affected both
by the market and by other social and organizational forces.
We examine how social and organizational forces are important to that
balance and these tensions. In doing so, the book tries to distinguish
between different organizational and societal mechanisms of diversity and
collectivity, especially four. These are: involvement, importance, position-
ing and sensemaking. These all operate on different levels (micro and
macro) that can be understood and analysed from a sociological and eco-
nomic perspective (see later).
Involvement is a mechanism of diversity mostly at the organizational
level, where people can deliberately involve others in an exchange of experi-
ences and considerations of workable ideas. Involvement presumes that
3
25. those who are involved are relatively independent and can speak freely
about their opinions.
Importance is a mechanism of collectivity. It presumes that certain init-
iatives are seen as better than others and therefore are exposed and diffused
more widely, so that people can adopt them or learn from them. The notion
of importance also implies that we are here not only speaking of the market
mechanism, but also of mechanisms that involve an element of voice (not
just choice). Hence, importance is a social mechanism of aggregation, selec-
tion and diffusion.
Positioning is a mechanism of diversity at the societal level. It requires
that people have the freedom to pursue their economic and social interests
and can express their opinions about ideas they perceive to be socially
effective or desirable. According to this mechanism, people can position
themselves as actors in innovation and economic development.
Finally, sensemaking is a mechanism of collectivity at the micro-level,
where people try to make sense of their experiences and thereby to discover,
not so much what is perceived as important and wise in the larger context,
but what is appropriate and meaningful in a specific context.
The different chapters of the book deal in different ways with these
crosscutting aspects of innovation. Some have a stronger focus on the
macro-level and some on the micro-level. Some tend to stress diversity and
others collectivity. Therefore, the chapters have been grouped in different
sections entitled involvement, importance, positioning and sensemaking.
Nevertheless, what binds together all of the chapters is the attempt to see
innovation from a broader perspective and at the systemic level where the
tensions between actors, and between diversity and collectivity, can be
studied.
BACKGROUND
Innovation with care is generally an approach to innovation that starts
from the following premises:
1. that innovation and the way in which innovation takes place is import-
ant to economic growth and social development;
2. that the concept of innovation has to be better understood in terms
of how it can be applied in practice, especially through case-studies;
and
3. that innovation in practice requires a reflexive approach that takes into
account both economic and social elements, as well as tensions across
sectors, organizations and people.
4 Introduction
26. Innovation with care grows out of research undertaken at Roskilde
University over recent decades. This research has focused upon how inno-
vation is changing from a technological and industrial mode to a reflexive
mode involving many types of institutions, sectors, companies and social
groups (Fuglsang and Sundbo, 2005; Sundbo and Fuglsang, 2001). This
calls for a new conceptualization of innovation as well as social develop-
ment, which can take into account the heterogeneity of relationships that
evolve around innovative activities.
Today, the innovative resources are much more widely distributed
throughout society than just a few decades ago (Chesbrough, 2003). Innova-
tion is no longer based in companies’ R&D departments, or in the state’s
large-scale projects. Innovation can be understood as an interactive process
that involves many and changing actors over time, and which serves mul-
tiple concerns and conglomerates of different users. This also makes it more
challenging for people to integrate different ideas and opinions about inno-
vation, to balance goals and means, and to create frameworks of mutual
communication, collaboration and understanding. It becomes critical to
analyse how this heterogeneity among sectors, organizations and people
can be managed in different ways, and in different social and strategic
arenas.
This historical approach to innovation can also be seen as being opposed
to a more homogeneous approach to innovation where innovation is seen
as something which is planned and managed in a more straightforward
and detailed way. The heterogeneity of innovation today means that innov-
ative activities cannot be easily controlled through detailed planning, but
that opportunities for innovation have to be continuously evaluated, inter-
preted and interfered with. Innovative organizations become interpretative
systems (Daft and Weick, 1984; Fuglsang and Sundbo, 2005). They try to
create some sense of direction and integrate people into changes by making
interpretations about the changing opportunities of the organization, and
how skills and opportunity can be adjusted to each other.
The main question, which should be explored, is therefore how a proper
environment for innovation can be constructed that takes into account
these complex mechanisms of diversity and collectivity. Furthermore, an
approach that uses various types of case studies in combination with other
research techniques may turn out to be an important way in which such
mechanisms can be better understood. It requires a more problem- and
action-oriented approach to the study of innovation.
The purpose of the book is to demonstrate that this approach is a fruit-
ful approach to innovation. Along these lines, innovation is, in our view,
more about interpretation than planning, more about heterogeneity and
tension than homogeneity and control, more about opinion than choice,
Innovation with care 5
27. and more about wisdom than science. The book will illustrate the value of
innovation with care through a number of interesting cases.
CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION
In most definitions of innovation, innovation consists of two aspects:
creativity and innovation (Amabile et al., 1996), invention and diffusion
(Rogers, 1995), exploration and exploitation (March, 1991), or variation
and selection (Nelson and Winter, 1977). This means that innovation is
seen as consisting of two integrated processes. New appropriate ideas or
inventions have to be explored in a creative way. In addition to this, there
is another parallel process going on where these ideas are aggregated,
selected, diffused, implemented and exploited. The interaction between
these two sides of innovation is critical.
For example, Teresa Amabile, who has studied creativity, defines inno-
vation in the following way. “We define innovation as the successful imple-
mentation of creative ideas within an organization. In this view, creativity
by individuals and teams is a starting point for innovation; the first is neces-
sary but not sufficient condition for the second” (Amabile et al., 1996:
1154–5).
Mulgan and Albery who have studied public and social innovation have
defined innovation in a similar vein: “We define innovation as ‘new ideas
that work’. To be more precise: Successful innovation is the creation and
implementation of new processes, products, services and methods of deliv-
ery which result in significant improvements in outcomes efficiency,
effectiveness or quality” (Mulgan and Albury, 2003: 3).
And Sundbo (1998: 12) in a book about service innovation gives the fol-
lowing definition: “I will use ‘innovation’ to describe the effort to develop
an element that has already been invented, so that it has a practical-
commercial use, and to gain the acceptance of this element.”
Most of these definitions of innovation have their origins in Schumpeter’s
original definition of innovation in his Theory of Economic Development. In
that book, Schumpeter is, among other things, conceiving the function
of the entrepreneur for economic development as someone who goes
against the mainstream. In his definition of innovation, Schumpeter stresses
both the ability of the entrepreneur to create entirely “new combinations”
and to open up new markets and teach the consumers to use innovations
(Schumpeter, 1934, 1969: 65–6).
This double sidedness of innovation is at the core of this book as it is also
the core of many descriptions of creativity. For example, in his book about
creativity, Csikszentmihalyi makes a distinction between the domain of
6 Introduction
28. creativity and the field of creativity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). The domain
is the specific area in which someone is creative, for example in science, art
or politics. The field is the wider environment in which creativity is recog-
nized and stimulated. It is often the field of innovation, rather than the
domain, which explains, according to Csikszentmihalyi, why some organ-
izations are more creative than others, for example why Florence was a par-
ticular creative city in the Florentine renaissance.
On the other hand, in this approach, we should not ignore the critical
factors that are important to creativity or the social psychology of creativity.
For example, in her work on the social psychology of creativity, Teresa M.
Amabile has examined the proposition that intrinsic motivation is crucial to
creativity (Amabile, 1996). Creativity is, as Schumpeter explained, an act
that is often motivated by itself rather than by external requirements or
extrinsic motivations. Creativity also requires that people are situated in a
domain where they possess the necessary domain-relevant skills – rather
than being put into a domain where they possess no such skills.
To treat creativity with care means that people are not moved to a
domain where they possess no domain relevant skills, and that intrinsic
motivation is not entirely replaced by extrinsic motivation. This may
increase the chances that creative results are appropriate and not bizarre or
eccentric. In this way creativeness means the ability to create new innova-
tive results that are meaningful and appropriate. Understood in this way,
the right microenvironment for creativity increases the chances of creative
ideas that are also appropriate to innovation.
BUSINESS INNOVATION AND SOCIAL INNOVATION
Innovation with care is also an approach to innovation which focuses upon
the interdependencies that exist within social and economic development
between business innovations on the one hand, and “social innovations”on
the other – in addition to the interaction of creativity and innovation. In
the perspective of social innovation, the relation between creativity and
innovation, variation and selection, gains another meaning, as we shall
briefly explore in the following.
Social innovations are innovations based in social goals and social
processes. Social innovation (Young Foundation, 2006) and business inno-
vation, however, often overlap and intertwine. A mobile telephone is a social
innovation and a business innovation at the same time: it serves a social
goal for those who use it, and it generates economic value for those who
produce it and for society. A new model of a mobile telephone is perhaps
not necessarily a social innovation if it does not serve a particular (new)
Innovation with care 7
29. social goal. To understand and analyse the social goal and value of an inno-
vation can be an important driver of business innovation.
Another aspect of social innovation besides the social goal and social
value is the social process and diffusion of innovation. All processes of
innovation, business innovations, social innovations or innovation with
care, could, as indicated, be said to consist of two related processes: explor-
ation and exploitation (March, 1991), variation and selection (Nelson and
Winter, 1977), or invention and diffusion (Rogers, 1995). Ideas are devel-
oped, and then some of these ideas are selected and scaled up as more
important or wiser than others. The selection mechanism can be “the
wisdom of the crowds” (Surowiecki, 2004), or it may be opinion-makers or
society’s elite that attempt to “pick the winner”.
Seen from the perspective of business innovation, the market mechanism
is crucial to this tension and the transition between invention and diffusion.
The “wisdom of the crowd” is here expressed by consumer choice implying
that certain ideas are picked by the crowd as being more effective or in some
sense better than others. Seen from the perspective of a social innovation
and innovation with care, the market is not the only mechanisms of dif-
fusion and scaling up. Here, other social mechanisms of aggregation, selec-
tion and diffusion are important too (see Rogers, 1995), and these are
sometimes more difficult to come to grips with from an analytical point of
view.
In some cases, as in public innovation, the market mechanisms may be
entirely missing, and therefore the social mechanisms of aggregation, selec-
tion and diffusion of innovation present an even more challenging task
when analysing it at the theoretical level and constructing it at the practi-
cal level. For example, the market mechanism cannot always be applied to
the selection of adequate learning or teaching tools in schools. Here, inputs
from many professionals and experts and even systemic reviews and
demonstrations of these inputs may be needed as a basis for selection. In
other cases, the social selection and diffusion of innovation is intertwined
with some kind of market mechanism, where the behavior of the user and
user choice in combination with user voice may be relevant. This is typical
for public television for example.
Innovation with care is therefore an approach to innovation that tries to
pay more attention to social mechanisms of diffusion and scaling up than
is usual, and to analyse the complex interactions that take place between
market mechanisms and social mechanisms, understood as a mechanism of
selection and diffusion.
In some cases, business innovations and social innovations, as men-
tioned, strongly overlap. In other cases social innovations are separate
domains but still crucial to business innovation. The university is a social
8 Introduction
30. innovation in its own domain, which still plays a crucial role for economic
and social development more broadly. Health is dependent on development
of commercial drugs as well as a range of social innovations including the
health system itself. The sewerage system is a social innovation that is
crucial for health conditions. Wikipedia is a social innovation that may end
up as a commercial innovation, but initially it started out as a social idea.
Social innovations, such as a library or a laboratory, provide social struc-
tures that inform the chances of discovery, creativity and innovation more
broadly in society. In some cases, social innovations are therefore domain
specific, in other cases they provide a different perspective on business
innovation, as in the case of the mobile phone or the use of SMSs.
The practical relevance of this approach is that there is a difficult balance
to maintain within social and economic development between market
mechanisms on the one hand, and social mechanisms of innovations on
the other. Furthermore, it becomes important to investigate how social
mechanisms can be constructed. More energy and resources could be
devoted to the study of the social sides of innovations because they are
crucial to innovations both to the chances of creative discoveries and to
the robust and meaningful application and implementation of these dis-
coveries in business and society. As such, social mechanisms of innovation
also inspire economic development more broadly and can be pertinent
to the implementation and the commercial exploitations of innovations.
Innovation with care is in this way really a broad concept for the produc-
tive tensions and balance between the commercial and the social sides of
innovation.
Innovation with care is also an approach to innovation which is different
from social engineering. Innovation with care represents, as we define it, an
incremental way to improve society and its institutions, and is based in the
social values and independent opinions of many citizens in the context of,
for example, a nation, that have to give their support to it. It corresponds
more or less to Karl Popper’s idea of “piecemeal”social change as opposed
to utopian social engineering, hence it is a critical-reflective and incremen-
tal approach to innovation (see Popper, 1962).
Innovation with care is a complex and a time-consuming process where
much can go wrong, because of the many unintended consequences and
risks associated with innovation. Therefore, we need a careful approach to
innovation where many perspectives and ideas are woven together in a
careful way.
Another important issue here is that innovation can be motivated in
many ways as Schumpeter already pointed out in his Theory of Economic
Development. Profit is one motive, but the creation of a small kingdom or
the wish to solve concrete problems could be other reasons for people to
Innovation with care 9
31. engage in innovation. Many important innovations cannot, initially, be, in
a meaningful way, understood directly as commercial innovations, driven
by profits, since their “business model” sometimes is very unclear. Google
and Wikipedia are two prominent examples. Other examples are those
development projects that take place in the name of cultural policies. For
example, when politicians, volunteers, business leaders and social entrepre-
neurs go together to develop their municipality, the direct commercial spin-
offs are usually very difficult to calculate and understand. This kind of
innovation is better described as a social innovation of its own purpose and
in its own right that may be complementary to business innovations in the
municipality, for example the well functioning of the labour market and the
chances of creativity and meaningful innovation.
Social innovations such as schools, universities, libraries, and so on can
be driven by public or private organizations. Voluntary organizations or
enthusiasts as well as business organizations can also drive social inno-
vations, and sometimes we tend to forget the significance of these initiatives.
For example, in the case of the so-called information society, the field of
social innovations is often much more important to discovering needs and
socially effective solutions to them than is normally understood. Social or
public entrepreneurs and social institutions can play a crucial role for devel-
oping network technologies to people that eventually become real resources
to them. These kinds of innovations can inspire business innovations and
can lead to the development of highly meaningful commercial innovations.
But the field of social innovations is very poorly understood today in com-
parison with many other high-profile commercial innovations. There is a
hidden economy of social and volunteer innovation at risk here, which
needs to be explored in order to identify good examples of socially effective
ideas that others might be able to learn from.
A main difficulty within the field of social innovation and innovation
with care is, however, that the impact of this approach is difficult to define
and measure. For example, what is the impact of the university? What is
the impact of the library and the school? It can be explained in broad
terms, but it is much more difficult to measure and analyse than commer-
cial innovations. Indeed, in some cases, certain success criteria can be
created, such as the impact of the health system or a particular medical
treatment on life expectancy. Still, even in this case, the complex interaction
of treatment, sanitary conditions and nursing are very difficult to explain.
And in many other cases, the measurement of impact is a very difficult
issue. Furthermore, the impact of social innovation and innovation with
care on business innovation is an extremely complicated issue in itself. For
example, what is the impact of the public library on business innovation?
Does it in one way or another improve the quality of the work force?
10 Introduction
32. But these difficulties of measuring the impact of social innovation should
not mean that we neglect to throw more light on these issues and their cri-
tical impact on society.
SCHUMPETER I, II AND III
Our approach to innovation is partly inspired by the tensions in Joseph
Schumpeter’s work between his early work, so-called Schumpeter I, and the
late work, so-called Schumpeter II (see Phillips, 1971 for a discussion). One
might say that our approach is an attempt to formulate a Schumpeter III
approach that reconsiders the wider context of innovation.
In the early work, Schumpeter stressed the role of the entrepreneur
(Schumpeter, 1934, 1969). The entrepreneur is described as a special type of
person with a special motivation, which is not necessarily driven by profits.
The entrepreneur is a dynamic person outside the mainstream, and has a
function for changing economic structures. In his later work, by contrast,
Schumpeter thought that the social function of the entrepreneur had disap-
peared (Schumpeter, 1947). He thought that innovation had become a
routine-activity in the labs of the modern business corporation. Schumpeter
claimed that the entrepreneur was no longer a very relevant type since inno-
ation had become more integrated into society.
The particular distinction between the entrepreneur and routine-based
innovation in Schumpeter’s work is important here. But what also matters
is that Schumpeter’s work tells us that different forms or modes of inno-
vation exist, such as the entrepreneurial form in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries and the routine-based form in the mid-twentieth
century. Furthermore, there may be different motives and rationales behind
the various approaches to innovation as well.
What we are missing in Schumpeter’s work is, perhaps, a recognition that
these two forms of innovation may exist at the same time and in some ways
are interdependent. Schumpeter, by contrast, seems to think that one his-
torical period (that of heroic entrepreneurs) is being entirely replaced by
another (that of the large corporations). Clearly, from what we know today,
this is wrong. There is still a function for entrepreneurs, and today new
forms of entrepreneurship are being promoted, such as social entrepre-
neurship and public entrepreneurship. They have, however, to be under-
stood at the systemic level rather than at the level of the individual.
The distinction between Schumpeter II and Schumpeter III is of the same
character as the distinction between Schumpeter I and Schumpeter II. These
three approaches represent different frameworks of innovations, where
innovations proceed in different ways, are motivated by different factors,
Innovation with care 11
33. aggregated, selected and diffused in different ways, and often crystallize into
different kinds of institutions with different underlying rationales.
What we argue, along with Chesbrough (2003), is that innovation today
is no longer only based in the routines of R&D inside large corporations.
But we also argue that this leads to the formation of new mechanisms
of creativity and diffusion of innovation that can be understood at the
systemic level. In the field of science studies, Nowotny and others have been
discussing so-called mode II science, where external requirements come
to play a growing role (Nowotny et al., 2001). They use the metaphor of
“agora” to describe how a public arena of science is formed where the
quality and the relevance of science is being discussed by scientists as well
as by citizens and politicians. In the same way we argue that a new mode of
innovation is emerging, the Schumpeter III approach, where new mech-
anisms of creativity and diffusion of innovation are becoming important,
and where market mechanisms and social mechanisms are blended in new
ways. For example, we argue that new strategic arenas of innovation are
being formed to which many types of actors are linked, such as universities,
companies, government institutions and user groups. Furthermore, emp-
loyees and consumers are interlinked in new ways at the systemic rather
than only the individual level.
One important expression of Schumpeter III that we want to stress in
this book is innovation in services. Service providers are very dependent
on their front personnel and their ideas, because the services are often co-
produced by the consumer and co-consumed by the provider, and the con-
crete work that goes into this is often difficult to describe in very precise
terms. Some innovations in services are indeed business innovations, but
many innovations may be better explained as social innovations in the sense
that they are more related to the problem-oriented work of the front per-
sonnel than directly to a commercial strategy. It is based in the interpre-
tation and understanding of a situated problem. This problem-orientation
can also often be interlinked with the life-story, intrinsic motivation and
professional pride of the service-worker.
Of course, the clever service provider will try to involve the service
worker as much as possible in the business development, because he wants
“ideas that work” (Mulgan and Young) drawn from the experience of the
service worker. This becomes even more crucial today under the new
‘Schumpeter III paradigm.’ The employee and the consumer therefore
become more and more involved at the systemic level in innovation activ-
ities, rather than they are interacting and developing services only in indi-
vidual face-to-face-relationships.
Both in the private and in the public sector, the “journey to the interface”
becomes an important theme (Parker and Heapy, 2006), that is the journey
12 Introduction
34. to the interface between the front personnel and the consumer. Experiences
in the front have to be explored and collected in a more systematic way. In this
journey, the interpretation and understanding of the needs of the consumer
and the social goals involved in consumer behavior in a broader sense
becomes crucial. In the “journey to the interface” the knowledge and experi-
ence of the front-personnel is therefore also critical. At the same time, the
front-personnel are seen as people who should not act on their own, but on
behalf of the system (see Parker and Heapy, 2006). In this way, the issue
becomes one of how people can learn from each other and how the good ideas
can to be scaled up and diffused across and between people in organizations.
This systemic orientation towards external ideas and their combination with
internal experiences is an important aspect of the Schumpeter III model.
The diffusion of the Internet and WEB2 and the many new services that
are offered on the Internet provide plenty of examples of innovation with
care where the innovative resources are highly distributed and where some
innovative ideas are being systematically collected and scaled up, or picked
by the crowd or through other mechanisms of selection. For one thing, these
services are often developed as social innovations in a community of prac-
tice and then eventually they develop into business innovations. Facebook
is an example of this (see Ellison et al., 2006). It was initially a network tech-
nology inspired by earlier ways to introduce students to each other using
photographs in a physical “facebook”. Then it was developed by a student
at Harvard University into a worldwide e-based service for students. It will
probably evolve into a commercial innovation in time to come.
Schumpeter III is a mode of innovation where the interpretation, explor-
ation and exploitation of external ideas as well as their combination with
internal experiences and ideas become increasingly important (Chesbrough,
2003), and where the diffusion and scaling up of ideas that are thought to
be better take new forms in the market as well as society and in organiz-
ations, as we shall explore in this book.
DIVERSITY AND COLLECTIVITY, VARIETY AND
SELECTION
Innovation requires diversity and collectivity, variety and selection, cre-
ativity and innovation at the same time. The balance between the two sides
of the coins is a crucial aspect of innovation – and crucial to this book. This
balance we understand as affected both by the market and by other social
and organizational forces.
The book tries to distinguish between different analytical perspectives
that can be helpful for studying these balances or tensions. As a way to
Innovation with care 13
35. organize the chapters of the book we can discern four broad analytical
perspectives. These are as previously mentioned: involvement, importance,
positioning and sensemaking. These should be understood as different
broad perspectives on diversity and collectivity on different levels. What
follows is a brief description of these analytical perspectives that organize
the chapters of the book after which the single chapters will be presented.
Involvement
Involvement means that innovators can seek to involve many opinions and
ideas during innovation. Often, for innovation to take place, it is important
that employees and users are involved in the exploration of inventions and
new “ideas that work.” How this involvement can take place is a compli-
cated issue and a fruitful ground for new research as well as case-studies.
Involvement is a mechanism of diversity or variety, but it also requires
that management carefully selects some of the ideas while others are dis-
missed. Hence, involvement requires a careful approach to both variation
and selection, or, as it is explained in Sundbo’s chapter, to reflexivity and
strategy-making at the same time.
Most obviously, employees can be involved in innovation activities. But
consumers can also sometimes be involved. For one thing, they can be
involved through the employees having many years of experience with con-
sumers. The employees’ discovery of consumer needs can sometimes be
crucial for improving goods and services. This is true especially in services
and public services.
In some cases, the exploration of consumer needs may be more difficult
than in others. For example, in the public sector, a principle of universal-
ism is often important, and employees for good reasons have to think in
terms of rules and public law rather than individual needs. To listen more
carefully to individual citizens or to make use of employees’ experiences
with them may almost constitute a paradigm shift in the public sector.
Furthermore, while in many settings involvement of employees and con-
sumers may work in the individual case, in the changing context of inno-
vation, the involvement of employees and consumers must, as mentioned,
increasingly take place in a systemic way. People must learn to act on behalf
of the company system rather than on behalf of themselves. This also
requires a careful balancing of strategy and reflexivity.
Importance
Importance stresses the principle that some ideas may tend to become more
widely diffused than others. Importance therefore refers to a mechanism of
14 Introduction
36. collectivity and selection. It presumes that certain initiatives are perceived
as better or more appropriate than others and therefore are recognized by
more people, and that people are willing to adopt them or learn from them.
The notion of importance also implies that we are not only speaking
of the market mechanism, but also of a mechanism that involves an
element of voice. The market mechanism cannot always be used to scale up
and diffuse important ideas. Thus, in many institutional settings, and in
the context of many services, people cannot, in practice, make use of the
market mechanism, because they are dependent on the services that
are provided where they live and work, such as schools, kindergartens, res-
taurants, local cultural offers and so on.
To find ways other than the market mechanism to promote experiences,
make visible the good ideas and scale up the better initiatives so that others
can learn from them is a major challenge for many social and public services.
Positioning
Positioning means that companies and institutions can position themselves
as actors in economic change and innovation. They are not role-takers in a
passive way, but they can actively position and reposition themselves in
relation to each other. Nevertheless, in the context of increasing complex-
ity, it may sometimes be quite challenging to acknowledge and recognize
each other’s competences and qualities.
Positioning is a mechanism of diversity or variety at the societal level. It
requires that people have the autonomy to pursue economic and social
interests and can express their opinions about ideas they perceive to be rele-
vant – and can communicate what their own contribution to innovation
and development may be.
Positioning can be thought of as something that takes place both among
individual persons and among institutions. For example, classical entrepre-
neurship is an embodiment of positioning, where individual persons position
themself in relation to other people. But also institutions, such as universi-
ties, schools and libraries, have a need to position themselves in order to
demonstrate their value to others. Hence, the university is not the same as an
R&D lab in a private firm and the public library is not the same as Google
(two examples from this book). They each have to position themselves in
order to make clear what their individual gift is. How can they do this?
Sensemaking
Sensemaking means (following Weick, 1995) that there must be room for
continuous sensemaking in connection with innovation processes in order
Innovation with care 15
37. for people to discover and exploit new experiences and ideas and make
them intelligible among each other. Managers and employees must create
a “mindful environment”where they collectively can make sense of people’s
changing perceptions and ideas of social and economic opportunities.
Sensemaking is a mechanism of collectivity or selection at the micro-
level, where people together try to make sense of changes and thereby to
discover, not so much what is perceived as important and wise in the larger
context, but what is appropriate and meaningful in a specific situated
context.
A metaphor for sensemaking, which is used in this book in several chap-
ters, is that of “translation.” Translation means that new ideas, goods and
services are translated or transformed by people to fit the local context
before they can be used. This is critical in the emerging context of open
innovation and strategic reflexivity. External ideas have to be adapted to the
local context before they can be used, and sometimes, when it is difficult to
“translate” them, they must be dropped.
Perhaps this is also an approach to innovation that has a particularly
strong hold on Scandinavian societies. Here the adoption of ideas, inven-
tions and technologies from the outside world, and the attempt to translate
them into something locally valuable, has been a critical aspect of eco-
nomic development and the development of the welfare states.
THE CHAPTERS OF THE BOOK
All of the chapters in the book deal with certain tensions or paradoxes in
innovation, as described above, which relate to involvement, importance,
positioning, or sensemaking. Innovation with care is thus an approach that
seeks to analyse and understand how people in empirical cases are dealing
carefully with these tensions and paradoxes.
In the first section of the book about “involvement,”we investigate tensions
between engaging people’s opinions and ideas on the one hand, and the
overall strategy of a company or an organization on the other.
Jon Sundbo examines tensions in organizations between the involvement
of employees in innovation, and care for the overall strategy process of a
company or an organization. Sundbo pays attention particularly to inno-
vation in services, and his chapter includes a review of the literature on service
innovation with respect to the involvement of employees. Sundbo’s chapter
also draws on a multiple case approach to service firms. Sundbo concludes
that service innovations are based on care for the strategic reflexive processes
as well as the actors and roles involved in service production. This care does
16 Introduction
38. not only mean the nursing of the people and encouraging intrapreneurship,
but also restrictions and a strict decision process concerning new ideas and
innovation projects.
Jan Mattsson examines tensions in an organization between different
facets of care that are important to working with Customer Relationship
Management (CRM). Taking care is the physical handling of the CRM
innovation process and running the subsequent CRM system. Caring for
customers and employees is a psychological sensitivity to how customers
and employees react when faced with change and re-organization. Careful
operation means that safeguards are in place and care is taken when design-
ing the system to ascertain the increased value can be offered to customers
in exchange for the extra effort of data input and co-ordination.
John Damm Scheuer explores tensions that emerge in an organization
when a general idea travels into the organization and is translated into
something useful by the people inside that organization. In a case study of
innovation in health care (the case of the “clinical pathway”), he argues that
the innovation process may be better understood if theorized as a transla-
tion rather than an implementation or rationally planned process. Scheuer
also argues that the concept of “innovation with care” may be defined as
local translators’ translation of innovative ideas in a way that tests the pros
and cons of an idea in relation to local knowledge and takes appropriate
steps to integrate those elements of the idea.
The second section of the book is about “importance.” It examines how
certain ideas are scaled up and selected and in some sense become more
important than others, in a careful balancing of variation and selection, or
exploration and exploitation.
Lars Fuglsang explores some of the tensions between variation and
selection in the context of public innovation. Through a case study of the
Danish public library, he tries to build an analytical framework for analyz-
ing innovation with care in the public sector. He shows how the mode of
innovation is partly changing from “institutional innovation” to “open
innovation.” This leads to a quest for mechanisms of variation and selec-
tion, rather than, for example, mechanisms of homogenization among
public institutions. Fuglsang argues that new social and strategic arenas are
created in the library case, which enables variation and selection, and the
diffusion of important new ideas.
Gestur Hovgaard examines tensions that exist between exploration and
exploitation, as well as stability and change, in the construction of an inno-
vative new company, which is the Danish food-ingredient company
Danmark Protein (DP). Today it is incorporated within the dairy giant Arla
Innovation. Hovgaard shows how exploration and exploitation are activities
that vary, due to different modes of innovation. This is a similar argument to
Innovation with care 17
39. the one made by Fuglsang in his chapter. Finding a proper balance between
exploration and exploitation is a key to the success of a company. This
requires an “interpretative tradition,” mutual networking and a common
understanding. This is consistent with both Sundbo and Fuglsang in this
volume.
Lars Fuglsang, Jeppe Højland and John Storm Pedersen applies a quan-
titative analysis to investigate tensions between variation and selection
again in the public sector. They present a survey, which has been sent to
leaders in Danish public institutions about innovation activities. The
chapter seeks to define a proxy for innovation with care in order to quan-
tify its impact on various output measures. The survey shows that inno-
vation does take place in the public sector, and that variation rather than
copying is the rule. This is consistent with Møller’s findings (see below). The
chapter also documents that innovation with care is an effective way of
dealing with external requirements.
Jørn Kjølseth Møller examines tensions between path-dependency and
diversity in the public sector with a special view to a “Management
Greenhouse”created by employers and employees’organizations in Danish
municipalities. He argues that diversity in the public sector is a more
common phenomenon than normally understood in, for example, neo-
institutional theories. He shows how the potential for innovative manage-
ment in public organizations is determined by the institutional context,
where the public institutions are functioning. Similarly to Hansen and
Serin (see below) and Fuglsang (the arena approach) he argues that these
issues are incorporated into strategic arenas, where specific types of inter-
ests are expressed, specific issues negotiated and specific rules of the game
established. The Management Greenhouse is an example of this.
In the third section of the book, three chapters discuss how actors can
position themselves in various ways in the broader, macro-economic context
of innovation – and what tools are available for that.
Povl A. Hansen and Göran Serin investigate tensions between universi-
ties and firms and different notions of public and private research. By way
of a case study of Øresund Science Region they argue that a “platform organ-
ization” can be seen as a solution to these tensions when universities and
firms have different perspectives on the purpose and structure of research.
According to Hansen and Serin, a platform organization can promote a
caring approach among the different institutions to each other’s approaches.
Hansen and Serin use the so-called triple helix model of government-
university-industry interaction to explain the role of the platform organiza-
tion as a framework for interaction and positioning.
Ada Scupola and Charles Steinfield explore the tensions that exist
between firms’ globalization and localization perspectives, and how these
18 Introduction
40. differing perspectives can be “taken care of”. Through a case study of
Medicon Valley, a leading biotechnology cluster in Denmark, they show
how Internet-based technologies and a number of additional critical activi-
ties can contribute to and support the development of localized economies
such as industrial clusters, while also contributing to the globalization of
the economy by connecting companies and clusters of companies across
different regions of the world.
Jerome Davies and Lee N. Davies examine tensions between an individ-
ual inventor (the “Mad Max”) and the commercial context in which that
inventor has to position himself. The chapter refers to a case study of inven-
tor Robert Kearns and his lawsuit against the American and European
automobile industry. Davies and Davies argue that many inventions may
not have any commercial potential to begin with, irrespective of what the
“mad” inventor may have thought. Although inventors are “ripped off,”
this may be more a reflection of their lack of positioning skills than of any
major wrong-doing on the part of their financial partners. Those inventors
who have been “ripped off,” as was the case with Kearns, might have
avoided this fate by observing the signals of their opposite number more
“carefully.”
In the final section of the book about “sensemaking,” four chapters
examine tensions and paradoxes at the micro-level that are critical to
benefiting from innovation.
Peter Hagedorn-Rasmussen analyses tensions between strategy and
sensemaking by way of a case-study of a e-realtor company under creation.
“Care” describes, according to Hagedorn-Rasmussen, an approach that
bridge the relationship between the seemingly uneasy pairs of strategy
and sensemaking. Care implies a very broad range of meanings including
assiduousness, thoughtfulness, sensitivity, consideration but also anxiety,
trouble and concern. It might be argued that this lack of conceptual accu-
racy makes it an odd concept in (micro)sociological studies. On the other
hand, the connotations we attribute to the concept of care may be highly
accurate and descriptive for the processes of innovation as well as entre-
preneurship, where the balance between strategy/strategizing and sense-
making is important.
Connie Svabo explores tensions between innovation and durability in an
innovation project in the fashion industry. She argues that an innovation,
paradoxically, is an artifact, which is continuously engineered and main-
tained in a stable form. She presents a case study (or story) of an innova-
tive project, “Sidecar” in a small-scale fashion industry, which was both a
success and a failure. In line with the approach presented by Scheuer, Svabo
focuses on actor-network theory and translation. The chapter tells a story
of the struggles of translating innovative ideas into material forms, and
Innovation with care 19
41. shows that the work of innovation consists of continuous attempts to
create material order.
Hanne Westh Nicolajsen examines tension between a new networked
communication technology, called ProjectWeb, and three organizational
settings in which it is implemented. Her study demonstrates the critical role
of the individual entrepreneurs (or “intrapreneur”) as an integrating force
of technology, innovation and organizational change. According to her
study, entrepreneurs are not only needed in the initial phase of idea gener-
ation, but also in the phase of implementation. Hanne Westh Nicolajsen
argues that it is extremely important to make sure that at least one central
person have the right qualifications and interests in order to benefit from
technological changes and innovations in an organization.
Finally, Poul Bitsch Olsen, inspired by the approach of Karl Weick,
analyses a tension in innovation projects between old and new experiences.
His example comes from sports: the continuous innovation that goes
between a handball league coach and his team. Olsen shows how the experi-
ence of interruptions and change processes must be continuously made
intelligible and selected at the micro level. He argues that “mindfulness” or
“mindful innovation” is a concept that can be used to understand how cre-
ative action and new experiences are carefully selected and used in this way.
Mindfulness in innovation means that experience is noticed and made intel-
ligible, and new knowledge is the outcome of this.
REFERENCES
Amabile, T.M. (1996), Creativity in Context: Update to The Social Psychology of
Creativity, Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Amabile, T.M., R. Conti, H. Coon, J. Lazenby and M. Herron (1996), “Assessing the
work environment for creativity,” Academy of Management Journal, 39 (5),
1154–84.
Chesbrough, H.W. (2003), Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and
Profiting from Technology, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996), Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and
Invention, New York: HarperCollins.
Daft, R.L. and K.E. Weick (1984), “Toward a model of organizations as interpre-
tation systems,” Academy of Management Review, 9 (2), 284–95.
Ellison, N., Ch. Steinfield and C. Lampe (2006), “Spatially bounded online social
networks and social capital: the role of facebook”, paper read at The Annual
Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA), 19-23 June,
at Dresden, Germany.
Fuglsang, L. and J. Sundbo (2005), “The organizational innovation system: three
modes,” Journal of Change Management, 5 (3), 329–44.
March, J.G. (1991), “Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning,”
Organization Science, 2 (1), 71–87.
20 Introduction
42. Mulgan, G. and D. Albury (2003), Innovation in the Public Sector, London: Strategy
Unit, Cabinet Office.
Nelson, R.R. and S.G. Winter (1977), “In search of useful theory of innovation,”
Research Policy, 6 (1), 36–76.
Nowotny, H., P. Scott and M. Gibbons (2001), Re-thinking Science: Knowledge and
the Public in an Age of Uncertainty, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Parker, S. and J. Heapy (2006), The Journey to the Interface, London: Demos.
Phillips, A. (1971), Technology and Market Structure: A Study of the Aircraft
Industry, Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.
Popper, K.R. Sir (1962), The Open Society and its Enemies, London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Rogers, E. (1995), Diffusion of Innovations, New York: Free Press.
Schumpeter, J.A. (1934, 1969), The Theory of Economic Development, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Schumpeter, J.A. (1947), Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, London: Allen &
Unwin.
Sundbo, J. (1998), The Organisation of Innovation in Services, Frederiksberg:
Roskilde University Press.
Sundbo, J. and L. Fuglsang (eds) (2002), Innovation as Strategic Reflexivity,
London: Routledge.
Surowiecki, J. (2004), The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the
Few and how Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economics, Societies, and
Nations, London: Little Brown.
Weick, K.E. (1995), Sensemaking in Organizations, Foundations for Organizational
Science, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Young Foundation (2006), Social Silicon Valleys: A Manifesto for Social Innovation,
What it is, Why it Matters and How it can be Accelerated, London: Young
Foundation.
Innovation with care 21
46. 2. Innovation and involvement in
services
Jon Sundbo
INTRODUCTION
This chapter will discuss innovation in services and employees’ and man-
agers’involvement in the innovation process, which means that the top man-
agement takes care of employees and managers. Service is a production
which requires the involvement of employees and managers in the innova-
tion process because it is what could be called a “broad” organizational
process. By this I mean that it is a process that involves the total organization
and not only a small group of researchers. Involvement in service innova-
tions is not an advantage, it is a must. Care, which means awareness of the
employees’ wellbeing and behavior and attempts to improve these, is, there-
fore, a prerequisite for service production.
“Service” is a broad category (see Illeris, 1996, for a definition) which is
generally defined as the solving of problems that cannot be solved by the
customer himself by use of a tool, a commodity. Services includes physical
services such as cleaning, transport, operating hotels, knowledge services
(for example education, consultancy, banks, real estate agency and per-
sonal services), health care services (for example hospitals), social services
(for example social security and advice), psychotherapy and hairdressing to
name but a few.
In the chapter I will, on the basis of earlier empirical studies, discuss theo-
retically how the innovation process in services can be conceived. First I will
discuss the nature of innovation in services and present an overview of the
literature on innovation in services. Then a model of the innovation process
is introduced and it is discussed how care is a part of the process. Finally, I
will provide three empirical examples to give a deeper understanding of
how innovation with care is carried out.
25
47. INNOVATION IN SERVICES
What are innovations in services? I will start by discussing the nature of
service innovation. There is a general overview of the literature on innova-
tion in services which summarizes the research results and the general inter-
pretation of what innovation in services is (Miles, 2004; Aa and Elfring,
2002; Gallouj, 2002; Sundbo, 1997, 1998; Boden and Miles, 2000; Coombs,
1999). The character of service innovations is discussed in this literature. A
core element in the discussion has been whether innovation in services is
different from that in manufacturing. The basis for this discussion are the
many case studies that have been carried out about services firms (for
example Miozzo and Soete, 2001; Sundbo, 1996, 1998; Boden and Miles,
2000; Howells, 2004; Vermeulen, 2001; Metcalfe and Miles, 2000; Andersen
et al., 2000; Sundbo et al., 2001; Fuglsang, 2002; Gallouj, 2002; Brentani,
1993; Finch et al., 1994). These case studies have been carried out in a
variety of service industries (for example consultancy (van Poucke, 2004;
Sundbo, 1998), engineering consultancy (Mattsson, 1994; Larsen, 2001;
SIC, 1999), computer services (Jönsson, 1995), cleaning and other opera-
tional services (Djellal, 2002; Sundbo, 1999a) and tourism (Hjalager, 2002;
Mattsson et al., 2005; Sundbo et al., 2007)). Surveys also play an important
role. The well-known CIS-surveys (Community Innovation Survey) carried
out by Eurostat (Innovation in Europe, 2004; Evangelista and Sirelli, 1998;
den Hertog et al., 2006; Drejer, 2004) have, since the early 1990s, included
services. Other European surveys have also been carried out (INNO-
Studies, 2004; Hipp and Grupp, 2005; Djellal and Gallouj, 2001; in
Denmark SIC, 1999; Erhvervsministeriet, 2000).
It has been demonstrated that innovations in services are more complex
and integrated. Namely, they are often product, process, organizational
and market innovation in one and they are often small improvements (Voss
et al., 1992; Boden and Miles, 2000).
Innovations in services are rarely radical or large-scale (see Sundbo,
1998; Gallouj, 2002), but are mostly small improvements of products and
procedures. Services are the delivery of a complex process in which the
service is marketed contemporaneously with its production. Service
innovations may be of different kinds. They may be product innovations
(a new service product), process innovations (new procedures for produc-
ing the service), delivery innovations (new ways of delivering the service
including peripheral service (see Normann, 1991)) and quality assurance
(see Edvardsson et al., 2000); market innovations (new behavior on the
market or new strategic alliances), or organizational innovations (new
organizational forms, for example new structures or a new organizational
culture.
26 Involvement
48. A service is fundamentally a behavioral act, and innovation in services a
renewal of human behavior. This behavior often implies the use of tech-
nology, but the act is essential, which is why care is so important. This is
also the reason why it is a service and not a need that can be satisfied by
the customer buying a commodity. The service must be produced and deliv-
ered by a person at the moment of consumption. There are innovations in
service technology; for example knowledge services (such as accountancy,
consultancy, education) use IT and many services (for example insurance,
banking) cannot be carried out without the use of IT to administer the
service. All in all, innovations in services are both behavioral and tech-
nological, however, they are more behavioral than in manufacturing.
Empirical investigations have shown that 16 percent of the innovations are
technological and 30 percent depending on technology, and 54 percent of
innovations are non-technological (Sundbo, 1998). Service innovations
have increasingly become technological, particularly in knowledge services
where the service can be delivered as a self service via IT-networks (the
Internet, mobile telephones and so on). Thus, when we talk about service
innovations, we may be talking of both technological and behavioral inno-
vations and often a mixture of both.
Service innovations are often integrated, which means that they are
product, process, organizational, delivery and market renewals at the same
time. Even though they are integrated, they are often only small steps in
renewing the services. Examples of typical service innovations could be a
new insurance policy with different conditions and premiums; a cleaning
contract not defined by the procedures but by the result (whether the cus-
tomer is satisfied that things are clean), a new way of measuring employee
satisfaction presented by a management consultancy, a hotel introducing
free fruit in the reception. One may even discuss whether such small
changes are innovations (see Sundbo and Gallouj, 2000). However, they
develop the service firms and create economic growth. An attempt to create
a distinction between innovation and the daily changes that everything goes
through has been to argue that for something to be an innovation the
change must be reproduced (Sundbo, 1997; Gallouj, 2002). The new service
for a customer must be repeated for other customers, the new procedure or
organization for producing and delivering the service must be widespread
in the firm and so on.
Service innovations have also, in one tradition, been conceptualized as
service development and seen as new solutions developed on the basis of
the observation of service quality problems (Edvardsson et al., 2000).
Service innovation is described as service design and the tradition is ori-
ented towards practical solutions (for example Gummesson, 1991). Thus,
service innovations in this tradition are seen as a result of a kind of service
Innovation and involvement in services 27
49. engineering where new services are constructed, often with the aim of
improving the service quality.
THE ORGANIZATION OF INNOVATION
Innovations in services are mostly behavioral. Thus, they are different from
the mainstream product innovations in manufacturing, which are techno-
logical. However, there are similarities. Some service innovations are tech-
nological and some innovations in manufacturing are behavioral. But what
about the innovation process – the way in which the work with innovation
is organized? Is that different from what we know from the mainstream lit-
erature, which is based on manufacturing? The nature of the innovation
process in services will be discussed in this section.
Innovations in services are not laboratory or science based (Sundbo,
1997; Gallouj, 2002) as they typically are in manufacturing. Often inno-
vations are ad hoc, based on ideas from employees or managers. They may
be part of a more systematic process, however the innovations are not
top-down dictates, but must be developed along the way when ideas occur.
Even when the organization attempts to have a very systematic innovation
process, the concrete innovations must be developed by employees in the
organization. This situation in particular requires that many employees and
managers are not only involved in the innovation process, but also that they
feel involved. Innovation in services is extremely dependent on the employ-
ees’ and managers’ commitment to innovation and care. This also applies
to the top manager, who should be open to the active involvement of the
employees.
Customers also play a central role in service firms’ innovation processes.
The philosophy of service production is – according to the service man-
agement and marketing theory (van Looy et al., 1998; Grönroos, 2000) –
based on the customer as a co-producer. All this means that innovation in
services is a process which greatly involves different actors. It is not left to
experts as is often the case in manufacturing where scientists make most of
the effort.
Innovation has been described as a dual process that is both top-down
and bottom-up (Sundbo, 1996). The employees and middle managers get
ideas about new service products or new ways of producing and delivering
the services and fight for realizing their ideas. Such processes appear natur-
ally in all organizations. Often they die because the top management do not
react to the ideas or even reject them and signal negative sanctions towards
employees who use their time to get ideas and argue for them. This is not
an optimal situation for the top management since innovations do not
28 Involvement
50. surface in such an atmosphere, or at least fewer do. The top management
is rarely able to produce all the necessary ideas themselves and they do not
normally have an expert apparatus with the particular task of producing
innovations. The top management therefore becomes dependent on the
employees presenting ideas and thus on a care system.
However, the number and type of ideas should also be limited, if not, the
organization can waste many resources on getting ideas and communicat-
ing about their realization. The top management therefore continuously
makes decisions concerning which ideas should be realized and which
should be rejected. This places the top management in a power position,
but it also forces the top manager(s) to be involved in the innovation
processes.
Innovations often come from the top. The top managers get ideas or set
up a framework for innovation activities. However, the top manager cannot
develop and implement the innovations himself. He needs the employees in
that process. Whatever the idea presented by the top manager or an
employee, it leads to other employees and managers being involved in the
process when the innovation is to be employed. A service is a behavioral
activity that involves many people. Finally, the new service must be deliv-
ered by some service personnel. A service is not a commodity that can be
produced by a machine and stored. It is an activity that must be produced
by people at the moment of consumption and often the customer must be
present. All this leads to the fact that innovation in services is a process that
naturally involves many people and if the process is to be successful, all
these people must feel involved and cooperate, which means care.
The development and implementation of innovations is normally organ-
ized as project work. If the management decides to continue with the idea,
a project group representing different departments and often including the
idea-maker is established. The project group develops the idea to a proto-
type that is taken over by the department which will produce the new
service or implement the procedure. To have a successful development and
implementation process requires that all these people feel involved.
The customers have a particular position in service production as men-
tioned. This is also the case concerning innovation. The service personnel
pay much attention to the customers and how they perceive the service. This
is both related to observing possible quality problems, how the service
works for the customer – whether it solves his problem – and if he will buy
the same or other services from this firm again. This service-attention also
implies that employees often find a better solution for an individual cus-
tomer; for example, a better procedure for cleaning or a more convenient
type of pension saving. This better solution could be new and should then
be diffused to other service workers in the firm (reproduced) and thus
Innovation and involvement in services 29
51. become an innovation. Often the service employee observes that the cus-
tomer has an unsolved problem which could be solved by a new service.
This is also the basis for an innovation if the employee presents it as such
in the service firm.
Innovation in services is often customer based and customers are
involved in the innovation process (for example Howells, 2004). This does
not mean that the innovations are customer determined. The customers do
not directly present ideas for innovations. Service firms that have tried to
involve customers in this way have had bad experiences. Customers are
rarely able to tell which new services they want in the future. Customer
involvement is via interaction with employees, who then develop ideas for
innovations. When the top management wants to involve customers in the
innovation process, which is a good idea, it must nurse the employees’
meeting with the customers (the “moment of truth” in service production,
(Carlzon, 1987). Here there is a particular emphasis on the employees
getting innovative ideas from this meeting. The customers again play a role
in the later stage of the innovation process where a prototype of the inno-
vation must be tested. The prototype is tested on customer groups, either
in the form of discussions in focus groups or on a limited market segment.
Because innovations in services often are behavioral, there is normally no
R&D or other expert department which carries it out, and the service firms
are dependent on the employees involving themselves in the process. It is
therefore difficult to set up an ideal model concerning how the innovation
process should be organized. Improvements in innovation ability becomes
a matter of organizational learning (Argyris and Schön, 1978; Nonaka and
Takeuchi, 1995). Managers and employees learn how to organize the inno-
vation process from earlier cases and from other firms.
The continuous learning process also requires care and involvement of
the employees. These have the experience of what went well and what went
wrong and they are those who will put the new forms of behavior into prac-
tice. Thus the management is dependent on their involvement in the
improvement of the capability to innovate. The management itself, includ-
ing the top management, must also be involved in the learning process, if
not, this will not be taken seriously by the employees.
Entrepreneurship defined as establishing new firms on the basis of an
innovation has not received much attention in relation to services. Only a few
analyses can be found (for example Sundbo, 1998, and Morrison et al., 1999
in tourism). However, most new firms are within services, however, these
firms are very often not innovative and not growth-oriented. Nevertheless,
entrepreneurship does count for an important part of service innovations.
In manufacturing it has been observed that innovation systems exist
(Nelson, 1993). These are coherent networks of collaborating firms and
30 Involvement
52. institutions. In services, there is rarely a coherent innovation system. Many
actors and streams of knowledge inputs (service professional, technologi-
cal, management philosophical, trends in society and so on) are involved,
but they do not act as a coherent system (Sundbo and Gallouj, 2000).
SYSTEMS OF INVOLVEMENT AND CARE
I will now present a model of the innovation process based on the research
referred to above. The model consists of an overall conceptual framework
based on the concept of strategic reflexivity, which will first be introduced
and a phased categorization of the innovation process. The model divides the
innovation process into three phases, the idea phase, the development phase
and the implementation phase. The conceptual framework, it is argued from
a statement of care, is a natural approach in service innovations.
The involvement of actors and how the innovation process can be con-
sidered as care-taking is discussed. I have stated that involvement of actors
is important. However, the question arises: who are the actors in service
innovations? Three main actors can be identified, namely managers,
employees and customers. They have different roles in the three phases.
Service Innovation Processes and Care
Care is central in service innovation processes because these processes are
based on the broad involvement of many employees, managers and cus-
tomers and not only on expert-based R&D and technology development.
The innovation processes are complex social processes. Care means that the
top management is aware of the innovative potential of managers, employ-
ees and customers (and other external actors) and nurses these poten-
tials, but also that it sets limits for intrapreneurship based on the strategy.
Many service firms do this, and I will later give examples of how they do it,
however, most service firms could improve their care for the innovation
process.
The care aspect can be expressed in a conceptual model, which will be
explained in the next paragraph.
A Concept for Careful Service Innovation – Strategic Reflexivity
Innovations in service firms must be understood as careful and coherent
processes based on strategy forming a guideline (strategic innovation see
Sundbo, 2001). Even though innovations often come from loose ideas
through intrapreneurship, most service firms, at least the successful ones,
Innovation and involvement in services 31
53. have a general principle about which innovation to develop. A conceptual
model for this principle, called strategic reflexivity, has been developed by
Sundbo and Fuglsang (2002, 2006). This model will be explained in this
section and related to actor involvement and care. Strategic reflexivity
involves managers and employees actively, not only in the detailed inno-
vation processes, but also in the more general strategy process. Strategic
reflexivity is a general principle that may be found in all organizations no
matter which sector or industry, but it is particularly central in service firms.
The model sees the innovation processes in service firms as a broad
coherent process. Innovation is about the future of the firm. The service
firm is developed within a broad framework which relates to the goals for
where this firm will be in the market in the future. These goals and the
overall means for getting there are expressed in the strategy as explained
earlier. The strategy is the general guiding principle for the development of
the firm. Most service firms introduce service concepts, which are broad
service fields with a certain business idea. A service concept could, for
example, be SAS’s business traveler’s airline in the 1980s where SAS wanted
to serve the business traveler. This included high quality service counting
peripheral ones such as admission to SAS hotels, thus the journey could be
totally booked via SAS. The price was very high. Another concept in airline
services is the more recent concept of discount flying that low-price airlines
such as Ryan Air, and Easyjet have introduced. In that concept there is no
extra or added services such as meals, hotels and so forth, and even the core
service may be of poor quality (delayed planes and so on). However, the
price is very low. Such broader concepts are not only a product, they are a
bunch of products, processes, organizational forms, culture and attitudes.
The strategy specifies in general terms which type of service concepts the
firm should have. Innovations are the details that fulfill the concept. The
concepts are defined by these details. Therefore innovations in services are
small renewals which together change the concept.
The strategy is an interpretation of the future market (see Mintzberg,
1994). As nobody can know the future market, the service firm can only
provide a qualified guess and act on the basis of it. In the process of for-
mulating the strategy, many service firms involve the employees and man-
agers in order to have the broadest range of experiences, analyses and ideas.
The top management makes the final decision concerning the strategy, but
the employees and middle managers contribute to the process and can
influence the strategy.
When the strategy is decided, it must be implemented and work. The
strategy defines the kind of service concepts (for example “are we a busi-
ness travelers’ airline” or “discount airline”) and guides the innovation
processes (define areas for possible innovations and the borders outside
32 Involvement
54. which innovative ideas can not be accepted). However, since the strategy is
based on an interpretation of an unknown future, it is important to follow
the market and general societal trends to see if the pre-assumptions and the
implementation of the strategy is still valid. This requires involvement of
employees and managers. They follow the market, among others through
direct customer contact and they have a broad involvement in society. The
employee and managers should, therefore, reflect on the strategy and
whether it still works. Therefore the model is called strategic reflexivity.
This reflexivity also includes considerations about whether the types of
innovation and the concrete innovations are the right ones. All employees
and managers should be potentially involved in these deliberations. Some
have this as a working task, the others are to present their considerations if
they discover a problem. Such problems may include that the strategy does
not seem to work, the service concept does not seem to work or the inno-
vations that have been implemented have not been sufficiently successful.
The reflections may be based on systematic analyses and market investiga-
tions, on knowledge about new technology or service principles that the
firm has not considered or just on concrete daily observations.
Changes may also come from employees or managers acting as intrapre-
neurs by getting ideas for innovations and fighting for having them
accepted. The new ideas may be within the framework of the strategy and
thus the intrapreneurship is a contribution to an optimization of the stra-
tegic goals through involvement. They may also break the strategic frame-
work. In most such cases they will be rejected. However, in some cases
reflections within the management or among the employees may lead to
one innovative change of idea – not only the service concept, but the whole
strategy.
The reflections and innovative ideas and intrapreneurship thus may lead
to an adjustment of the principles for which types of innovations should be
developed, to the introduction of new types of service concepts or to an
adjustment of the strategy. In rare cases it may even lead to the introduc-
tion of a new strategy. These decisions are made by the top management,
but the employees and middle managers are involved in the process through
their reflexive roles.
The strategic reflexive innovation mode also includes the creation of the
different in the innovation processes that have been mentioned. These roles
can be institutionalized. The management may be aware that there are
people who play all the necessary roles and, if not, they can employ such
people or encourage such behavior to be developed among the employees.
This is a core part of care for the innovation process.
Customers do have a central role in the model of strategic reflexivity, not
as directly involved actors. They are the final judges that decide on strategic
Innovation and involvement in services 33
56. of the mucous membrane lining the whole alimentary canal, is
vitiated, as is proved by the unnatural quantity, colour, and fetor of
the evacuations; the urine likewise is altered in appearance, and the
skin is not more remarkable for the sense of heat, than for that of
dryness and harshness which it communicates to the touch. With the
excitement of the pulse and the increase of the heat, the pain in the
back and limbs and the general febrile uneasiness are much
augmented.
At this period, then, the fever is fully formed; the series of morbid
phenomena is complete: any thing more that happens is referrible to
degree and to duration, and must be the result of one or other of
these circumstances, or of their combined operation. And we now see
that the organs affected, constitute precisely that system of organs
which has been described as forming the febrile circle: that the
symptoms which denote the fever are just the symptoms which
indicate a derangement in the several functions performed by these
organs; and that the order in which they become successively
involved is exactly that which has been assigned.
As soon as the preternatural heat comes on, pain begins to be felt
in the head. Dr. Clutterbuck, in describing the general character of
the ordinary fever of London states[23]
that “the first symptom almost
invariably complained of is more or less of uneasiness of the head.” If
by uneasiness he meant pain, there is, if there be any truth in the
preceding observations, a long train of symptoms to intervene before
this symptom occurs. That it does ultimately occur is certain: but
commonly its place in the series is much later than is here assigned:
it is disordered function of the brain, indicated by loss of mental
energy, that appears to form the first symptom in this morbid train.
The pain, when it does come, is sometimes slight at first, and
occasionally it remains slight throughout the disease; at other times
it is pretty severe. Cases sometimes occur, in which, instead of pain,
there is only a sense of giddiness, and now and then the uneasy
feeling is described as that of lightness: or, on the contrary, as that of
heaviness or weight. But whether the feeling be pain, and that pain
be slight or severe, or whether it be giddiness, or lightness, or
heaviness, it indicates a similar condition of the organ, and requires
a similar treatment.
57. With the accession of pain of the head there is a manifest increase
in the disturbance of the sensorial functions. The inability to think,
to compare, to reason, to judge, great as it was at the
commencement, is now much greater. Instead of being more dull,
there are certain states of the mind which now become more acute
and vigilant even than in health. Sensation itself, at this period, is
invariably acuter than natural, as is indicated in all the organs of
sense. The eye cannot well bear the light: there are few cases in
which the full glare of day does not excite uneasiness, while in many
the ordinary light of a room cannot be borne: in these cases the
opening between the eye-lids is frequently observed to be contracted,
as if from an involuntary effort to exclude a portion of that stimulus
which in health excites no inconvenience, and this state of the eye-
lids assists in giving to the eye its dull and heavy expression, so
characteristic of fever. The increase of sensibility in the organ of
hearing is equally striking. Sounds which were not noticed during
health become acutely and even distressingly sensible, while
accustomed noises, such as that of a crowded street, are always
painful and often intolerable. The skin, considered as an organ of
touch, is in a like morbid state. An impression barely sufficient in the
state of health to produce sensation excites the feeling of tenderness,
and alternations of temperature, which in ordinary states are
scarcely perceptible, are painful. The senses of taste and smell, on
the contrary, are nearly obliterated, owing to the altered condition of
the membranes upon which the sensitive nerves are distributed.
From the earliest attack of the disease the sleep is disturbed and
unrefreshing; now scarcely any is obtained; the febrile uneasiness
will not allow of repose; the patient cannot remain in any position
long, incessantly shifting his place, never eluding his pain. At this
stage the sense of uneasiness in the limbs, oftentimes the severity of
the pain over the whole body, is peculiarly distressing.
With this progressive increase in the affection of the spinal cord
and the brain, the derangement in the circulating system is
proportionally augmented. The pulse is invariably altered, both in
frequency and character. Generally it rises to 90, sometimes to 100;
but in this form of fever it seldom exceeds this number; and
occasionally it never rises above 80. The stroke of the pulse is usually
stronger and fuller than natural, though it commonly retains its
58. softness, and does not impress the finger with that sensation of
sharpness which is characteristic of ordinary inflammation.
Occasionally, however, a degree of sharpness may be perceived in it,
and it is not easily compressed.
The thin white fur which already had begun to appear on the
tongue progressively increases in extent and thickness. The colour of
the fur usually changes, as the disease advances, from a dirty-white
to an ash-colour; but in this form of the disease the tongue always
remains moist, and never becomes brown. This state of the tongue is
almost always accompanied with thirst, but it is never urgent. There
is always a loss of appetite. The bowels are generally constipated, and
the secretions of the whole alimentary canal are vitiated.
Thus we perceive that the progress of the disease consists in
increasing mental and corporeal weakness; increasing pain in the
back, loins, and limbs; increasing heat of skin, acceleration of pulse,
and general febrile uneasiness, together with the occurrence of pain
in the head, and progressive derangement in the functions of
secretion and excretion.
The fever in this mild form is now at its height. It remains
stationary, or at least with very little change for an indefinite period,
generally for some days. The cerebral affection does not increase
beyond what has been described: there are no greater indications of
disease in the respiratory organs, and the mucous membrane of the
stomach and intestines does not denote any progressive
advancement in disease.
One of the most remarkable circumstances connected with the
ordinary fever of this country, in the present day, is the
uninterrupted and perfect continuity of its phenomena. As long as
the febrile state remains, nothing deserving the name of a remission
is in general to be perceived. Occasionally, it is true, a slight increase
in the symptoms may be observed towards evening, especially in the
heat of the skin; but even this is not common, and it is scarcely ever
great enough to deserve the distinction of being called an
exacerbation. Much less is there any regularity in the accession and
decline of such excitement. In the great majority of cases not the
slightest approach to an exacerbation and a remission can be
distinguished from the commencement to the termination of the
disease. Yet the older writers speak of these events as if they were as
59. palpable as the paroxysms of intermittent and as constant as the
return of morning and evening. There cannot therefore be a doubt
that the character of the ordinary fever of this metropolis is greatly
changed from the character of that which prevailed two centuries
ago; and the circumstances which have contributed to produce this
change will be considered hereafter.
In the great majority of patients in whom the symptoms continue
thus moderate, the disease disappears about the end of the second
week; that is, they are convalescent at that period; but it usually
requires eight or ten days longer before they have regained sufficient
strength to leave the hospital. Sometimes, although there is no
greater severity in the symptoms, the disease is more protracted, and
the recovery is not complete until the fourth or even the fifth week.
Beyond this period it is very rare for this form of the disease to be
protracted.
Almost all who are attacked with the malady in this, its mildest
form, recover: but now and then it happens that the symptoms go on
with this degree of moderation until about the end of the second
week. Then at the period when it is usual for convalescence to take
place there is no perceptible improvement; the patients seem even to
grow weaker; they lie more prostrate in the bed, and they are soon
incapable of moving; still they complain of no pain or uneasiness,
and it is not easy to detect any trace of disease in any organ; yet it is
but too evident that they grow worse, and ultimately they sink
exhausted. In these cases, on examination after death, it is
commonly found that disease has been preying on some vital organs,
although its presence could not be detected during life; and this
termination of the milder type of fever rarely happens, excepting in
aged persons, whose constitutions have been enfeebled by previous
diseases, or worn out by the various causes which depress and
exhaust the powers of life.
With an occasional exception of this kind the disease in this form
always terminates favourably; and the first indication of returning
health is remarkably uniform: it is almost always marked by longer
and more tranquil sleep. Instead of that restlessness which is so
characteristic of fever, and which forms the most distressing part of
it, the patient is observed to lie more still, and on waking for the first
time from an undisturbed slumber, he often spontaneously says that
60. he feels better. Better he may well feel, for his febrile uneasiness is
gone; the load that oppressed him is shaken off; he is a new being.
The pain of the head and of the limbs is so much diminished that
often he cannot help expressing his thankfulness at the change. The
countenance becomes more animated; its natural expression returns;
the tongue begins to clean; and after this state of the system has
continued for two or three days, the appetite returns. While these
favourable changes are going on, the pulse usually sinks about ten
beats below its highest point at the height of the fever; it is not
uncommon, however, for it to remain quick during the entire period
of convalescence; and for some considerable time it is easily excited
on any movement of the body, or any emotion of mind. In some
cases, on the contrary, when the attack has been very mild, it sinks
considerably below the natural standard, and is intermittent, a sign
which I have uniformly observed to be attended with a sure and
steady convalescence. In the mean time the appetite becomes keener
than natural; the strength gradually improves; and in a short time
the patient is restored to his usual health and vigour.
What the condition of the brain and of the organs correlatively
affected is, in these the mildest cases, we do not positively know,
because we have no opportunity of inspecting them, their favourable
termination being nearly without exception. But the more all the
phenomena are considered in their entire series, in the order of their
succession, in the uniformity, nay, even in the exclusiveness of their
seat, as well as in the unchanging sameness of their effects, the more
clear the evidence will appear of the soundness of the induction, that
the condition of all the organs in all the types of fever is the same in
nature, although there be no two cases of any type perfectly the same
either in the degree of the affection or in the stage of the morbid
process which it excites. If this induction be really just, we must
conceive that, in the synochus mitior, while the morbid affection of
the organs is slight, the diseased process which it sets up in them
stops before it produces any change in their structure.
However this may be, and to leave for the present all matter of
inference, and to keep strictly to the matter of fact, we do positively
know that the mild forms of fever become severe in consequence of
the supervention of inflammation in certain organs. Perfectly
unknown as the nature of the primitive febrile affection at present is,
61. yet that in the progress of the disease it does ultimately pass into
inflammation is a fact, the evidence of which it is impossible to
resist; although the same observation which teaches us this most
important truth, teaches us also that the inflammatory action is
always considerably modified by the febrile state. How it is so
modified, and to what extent, we shall consider hereafter. I have
spent much consideration and some labour in the effort to combine
the symptoms which attend these severer forms of the disease with
the ascertained conditions of the organs upon which such symptoms
depend. But since it is of paramount importance that the events
which actually take place should be known, and that the order in
which they succeed each other should be stated with clearness and
exactness; and since I have been able by no method that I could
think of to combine the pathology with the history without breaking
too much the continuity of the latter, I have been under the necessity
of separating these two most intimately connected subjects, and of
treating of them under distinct sections. In giving the history of the
events, I have detailed them strictly, as far as I am acquainted with
them, in the order in which they occur: and I have endeavoured to
arrange the cases that constitute the pathology in such a manner,
that they shall closely correspond to these events, and clearly
illustrate the order of their succession. If I have succeeded according
to my wish, the reader in studying the cases will be reminded, as he
proceeds, of the successive stages of the history, and if he again
revert to the history, after having studied the pathology, he will be
reminded of the morbid appearances in the organs which are there
described. To afford a clear perception of the connexion between the
successive events, as indicated by the symptoms during life, and the
progressive changes of structure in various organs, as demonstrated
by inspection after death; and thus to establish a strong and
indissoluble association in the mind between the morbid condition
and its sign, are the objects at which I have aimed. If I have
succeeded, I shall have accomplished one of the chief objects of my
undertaking.
The transition of a mild case of fever into a severe one, or the
progress of a case severe from the commencement, is accompanied
with, or depends upon, as will abundantly appear hereafter, certain
changes that take place in certain organs. These changes occur with
great regularity; the organs in which they take place are always the
62. same; and the symptoms by which they are denoted are uniform. The
organs affected are the spinal cord, the brain, the membranes of
both, the mucous membrane of the lungs, and the mucous
membrane of the intestines. For the reason just assigned the nature
of these affections cannot be described in this place, but must be
postponed to that part of the work which treats of the pathology.
Since however the symptoms are nothing but the signs of these
conditions, and the history of the succession of the former, is nothing
but an account of the indications of the successive changes that take
place in the latter, all the important symptoms must necessarily have
their seat in the head, in the thorax, and in the abdomen. Mixed and
blended as they appear in the different cases which the practitioner
is called upon to treat, nothing can appear more complex or more
variable: when analyzed, nothing is more remarkable than their
simplicity and their uniformity. In order to perform that analysis
with exactness, and to render it really instructive, these symptoms
must be contemplated as they arise in the affected organs. These
organs, as we have seen, are the cerebral, the thoracic, and the
abdominal; the symptoms therefore divide themselves into cerebral,
thoracic, and abdominal: there is, indeed, a fourth order, in which all
the organs appear to be equally involved; in which the general
affection is intense, and which therefore may be appropriately
termed mixed. We shall see that cases of this kind constitute by far
the most dangerous form of the disease.
63. I. Synochus Gravior with Cerebral
Affection,
occurs under two degrees of intensity: when the cerebral affection is
moderate, it may be termed subacute; when great, acute.
1. Synochus with Subacute Cerebral Affection, may be attended
for several days with no symptom which has not been already
enumerated in the account of the mildest form of the disease. The
accession is the same as in synochus mitior: the progress up to a
certain period is also the same. But at the time when the pain of the
head diminishes in the latter, it increases in the former. Still the pain
is often not severe. He who looks for intense pain, and suspects no
cerebral affection, unless accompanied with this symptom, will be
surprised by what will appear to him the sudden occurrence of new
symptoms, such as are immediately to be stated, which will at length
open his eyes to the danger of the case, and excite his wonder, which
it is not unfrequent to hear expressed, that an affection hitherto so
mild, should, without any previous warning, become so formidable,
and show but too manifestly that it is beyond control, and will
certainly proceed to a fatal termination. The warning was given, but
the sign was not understood. The descriptions of disease are
commonly taken from its most acute form; and it was long the
practice to derive them from this form alone, and the consequences
were truly fatal. Even with the best care that can be taken in drawing
up the history, these descriptions are exceedingly apt to become
ideal, and not real entities: to consist of a collection of all the
circumstances that exist in all cases, and not of that particular
combination only which is found in any one case: and thus to be not
the portrait of any individual, but a fancy picture bearing a general
resemblance to all individuals without being the true likeness of any.
The consequence is, that at the bed-side of the sick the original from
which the picture is supposed to be taken is not to be seen, and the
practitioner remains in doubt, if he do not fall into error. Error
serious and fatal many have fallen into, and, on this very account,
still continue to fall into, with regard to the existence of cerebral
64. disease in fever. Abundant evidence will be given in the pathology,
that it is not uncommon for the most unequivocal and extensive
changes of structure to take place in the brain and its membranes
without severe pain having ever been felt. Pain, however, though it
be not great, is almost always present. It is seldom that the pain
extends over the whole head; the patient generally points to some
particular part where it is peculiarly felt. In the majority of cases the
seat of the pain is either in the forehead, or at the temples, or over
the eyes; but occasionally it is in the occiput, and extends down the
neck, and in these instances it is often severe between the shoulders.
Now and then no pain whatever is felt. Question the patient as
much as you please, and he will tell you that he never has felt any
pain. In this case giddiness is the substitute. Giddiness in the
commencement, and in the early stage of fever, is as certain a sign of
cerebral affection as pain. Striking illustrations of this are afforded
by several cases detailed in the pathology; by consulting which, the
reader will see that precisely the same morbid changes take place in
the structure of the brain, although nothing but giddiness be
complained of, as occur in those which are attended with the acutest
pain. The practitioner will therefore fall into a fatal error who is
seduced into security because pain is absent; and who neglects the
remedies proper for inflammation of the brain, because the patient
complains only of giddiness. If giddiness be combined with pain, or
alternate with it, which is not uncommon, the giddiness being slight
if the pain be severe, and the pain being slight if the giddiness be
distressing, it indicates a more severe affection than if either exist
alone.
2. In the majority of cases, as long as the pain continues, the heat
of the skin remains considerably above the natural standard. But
often the heat over the general surface of the body is not great.
Commonly, however, it is hotter than natural over the head, and it is
hottest wherever the seat of the pain be fixed: so that the contrast is
often striking between the temperature over the forehead or at the
occiput, and the heat of the body in general.
3. The dull and heavy expression of the eye is greater than in the
milder form of fever. The conjunctiva generally becomes brighter
and more glistening than natural: though instead of this the vessels
are often more numerous and more turgid than usual, and give it the
65. appearance which is termed “muddled.” The eye at the same time is
commonly preternaturally sensible, and cannot bear a strong light,
although sometimes no complaint is made if the curtains of the bed
be withdrawn, or the window-blind be drawn up.
4. There is usually a corresponding increase in the general
sensibility; and what is remarkable, this is quite as much indicated
by the increased sensibility to sound as to light. A loud noise is
invariably distressing to the patient, and a continuance of it greatly
aggravates all the symptoms. Exposure to a glare of light and a loud
noise, would alone rapidly change a slight into the severest cerebral
affection.
The expression of the countenance is now very peculiar: it cannot
be described, but the experienced eye can seldom fail to recognize it.
It is indicative of suffering without the strength to bear it: it is not
anxious; that expression does not come on until a later period. The
face is sometimes flushed, but it is often pallid, which does but add to
the peculiar character of its expression.
5. As long as the pain of the head, the giddiness, and the increased
sensibility continue, there is invariably a want of sleep. The degree of
sleeplessness is not always in proportion to the head-ache or to the
other symptoms; but while the latter are present, the former is never
absent. That condition of the brain upon which sleep depends
appears to be easily disturbed by a great variety of causes; but
whatever be capable of affrighting this heavenly visitant, “tired
Nature’s sweet restorer,” whether in the mansion, the palace, or the
prison, and whether from the bed of healthful slumber or from the
couch of sickness, nothing so effectually and so constantly banishes it
as that febrile uneasiness of which we have already spoken; and
which, instead of declining, as in the milder form of fever, now
increases in strength and activity, and will scarcely allow the restless
body to remain in one position for a moment. He who has felt its
influence in this stage and degree of fever, will admit that there is
nothing comparable to the wretchedness it produces, except it be the
sweetness of the first waking moment after the first tranquil slumber
of returning health.
6. And now, sometimes closing this train of symptoms, but more
frequently being the first harbinger of another, delirium appears.
Delirium is usually first observed when any slight sound rouses the
66. patient from that disturbed slumber which is the only substitute
allowed for sleep. The delirium is seldom violent or long-continued,
but, when present, is like the talking of a person during sleep in a
disturbed dream. This symptom, however, is by no means invariably
present, and when it does come, it often postpones its visit to a
somewhat later period.
7. The pulse, during all this time, may not be much quicker than in
the mild form; and the state of the tongue and of the evacuations
does not materially differ.
Such is the train of symptoms when the brain becomes
prominently affected. These symptoms continue without
intermission, and with little change, for several days. The period of
their duration, when only in this degree of violence, is commonly
from eight to ten days: when their character is still milder or more
subacute, or when they have been mitigated by appropriate
remedies, it may be protracted fifteen days.
About this period a remarkable change takes place; an entirely new
train of symptoms supervenes, which is different, and which, indeed,
presents a striking contrast, according as the patient is destined for
life or death.
If it be for life, that sleep, of the long absence of which we have
already spoken, returns; and nothing can more truly express its
character than its familiar name, “balmy;” and healing is its
influence. From two or three hours of such slumber, the patient
awakens a new being. Not that the change is at first striking to an
inexperienced eye; but there is no fever nurse who does not
recognize it in a moment, and it is not long before the patient tells
you that he feels it. The febrile uneasiness is now much diminished:
the headache is greatly relieved; and the skin is cooler and softer.
The pulse may not yet be altered, or it may be a few beats slower than
before, but there is almost always already an improved appearance in
the tongue, which shews a beginning disposition to clean. These
favourable changes gradually increase. If the sleep the next night be
longer and more refreshing, which it generally is, on the following
morning a decided improvement is visible in the countenance. The
eye is clearer and more lively, and the expression of the countenance
is more natural. The skin continues cooler and softer; the tongue is
still cleaner, and the pulse, perhaps, slower by a beat or two; and
67. from this period, if no untoward event happen, the convalescence
proceeds just as has been described in the return of health in the
milder form of fever.
If, on the contrary, the case proceed unfavourably, a totally new
train of symptoms at this period sets in.
1. In the first place, the pain of the head obviously, and sometimes
strikingly, diminishes. Often it disappears altogether, or, if any
uneasiness remain, it is rather a sense of dullness and heaviness than
pain. In like manner the giddiness, if that were urgent, is no longer
perceptible: but it is remarkable that the pain in the back and loins
not unfrequently continues for some time after the headache has
disappeared: but, ultimately, that also ceases. The period at which
this important change takes place depends upon the severity of the
attack, and is materially influenced by the activity or inertness of the
treatment. In the subacute form, it usually takes place about the
tenth day from the commencement of the disease.
2. Simultaneously with the disappearance of the head-ache, there
is a remarkable diminution of the sensibility. The mind is duller and
more heavy. The patient may still be roused to answer with tolerable
coherence if spoken to; but when left to himself he is confused and
stupid. The eyes now become injected: often suffused; and the
heaviness and dullness of their expression is increased.
3. It is at this time that delirium, if it appear at all, most commonly
comes on. The increasing insensibility, if not attended with decided
delirium, is almost always accompanied with moaning or incoherent
muttering, especially during the short and interrupted slumbers
which form the substitute for sleep.
4. Striking as these changes are in the functions of the spinal cord
and brain, those which take place in the number and character of the
pulse are no less important. Even in cases the most decidedly
subacute, it is seldom that it does not rise ten beats, so that if before
it were 90, it will now be 100, and it is always weaker.
5. Now, too, signs of disease in the chest and abdomen are almost
always to be distinguished. A case purely cerebral, from the
commencement to the termination of the disease, is rarely to be met
with. If there be not cough, there is almost always a short and
hurried respiration, and more or fewer of the indications of
68. abdominal affection hereafter to be stated. Even in cases the most
purely cerebral the tongue always becomes more loaded and often
dry; and it is strikingly characteristic of the state of the nervous
system, that while the tongue becomes dry, the thirst diminishes.
Thus far it is possible that the disease may proceed towards a fatal
termination without proving mortal. It is not often that its course is
turned back or stayed after it has made this progress; but still such
an event is sometimes witnessed. When it does occur, the
amendment, both in its origin and progress, is very similar to that of
the favourable change which has already been described. More
tranquil and longer-continued sleep is almost always the earliest sign
that, in this severe struggle, life has obtained the victory. If, on
awaking from such sleep, there be less delirium, were delirium
present, or greater tranquillity, were the restlessness urgent; and if
there be any increase, although slight, in the sensibility, or any
improvement in the expression of the countenance, hope may be
entertained that that victory will be won; and hope may become
assurance, if the tongue which had been loaded become clean at the
edges, or the dry tongue become moist. Even under apparently the
most desperate circumstances, if these three symptoms concur, a
favourable prognosis may be pronounced with tolerable certainty.
Two or three days may elapse after their occurrence, before any
remarkable change is observable in the pulse; but it is seldom that
they continue twenty-four hours before the pulse falls at least ten
beats. Now and then, on leaving a patient in the evening with a pulse
at 120, we are surprised and delighted to find it in the morning as
low as 100. When the pulse has thus fallen towards the natural
standard, when the tongue has begun to clean, and when the skin has
become cool and soft, however desperate his condition but a few days
before, the patient may be said to be convalescent.
But though this favourable change is sometimes witnessed, yet,
from the point at which we left off the description of the progress to a
fatal termination, the too common history is, increasing restlessness
and sleeplessness; insensibility lapsing into coma; further
acceleration of the pulse; greater dryness of the tongue and
decreasing strength, until, at length, the powers of life receiving less
and less supply from the great systems in which they have their seat,
become completely exhausted.
69. Those who have been placed in situations which have afforded
them opportunities of witnessing much of the disease will, I trust,
acknowledge that the account now given is an accurate narrative of
the symptoms that occur, and of the order in which they succeed, in
the great majority of cases. Upon what conditions of what organs
they depend will be illustrated in the pathology.
Sometimes to these, other trains of symptoms are added—namely,
muscular tremor, frequent and sudden screaming; rolling of the head
upon the pillow; constant tossing of the hands about; picking at the
bed-clothes or other surrounding objects; partial paralysis of the
upper eyelid, so that one or both of the eyes remain half or almost
wholly closed; the ball of the eye unsteady or constantly rolling; the
expression of the eye and countenance at one time wild and anxious,
at another fatuous; squinting; the respiration now slow and
laborious, now exceedingly rapid; the pulse either slow, full and
regular, or slow and intermittent, or so quick that it cannot be
counted, or these states succeeding each other or alternating with
each other at short intervals; convulsions; involuntary and
unconscious stools—all these symptoms are never found combined
in any one case; but certain assemblages of them occur with some
degree of constancy, and depend upon certain conditions of the brain
and spinal cord. Since, however, the description of these conditions
cannot be given here, the further account of the signs which denote
them must be postponed until we treat of the pathology of the
disease.
2. Synochus Gravior with Acute Cerebral Affection.—Such is the
history of the synochus gravior with cerebral affection in its subacute
form. When its attack is the most acute, the history is precisely the
same, excepting that the symptoms are more severe, and their
progress quicker. The head-ache is much more intense; the giddiness
is more violent; the sensibility is excessive; the least noise is
intolerable; the slightest motion either of the head or of the body
aggravates all the symptoms; the eye is muddy, and very soon
becomes injected, and is perfectly intolerant of light; the pain in the
back, loins, and limbs, is nearly as great as it is in the head. The skin
is intensely hot, and sometimes impresses the hand with the sense of
pungency; but though every where thus hot and dry, its temperature
is peculiarly great over the scalp, so that if the head be shaved, and
70. wet clothes applied, they are quite dry in a minute or two. The febrile
uneasiness is excessive; the patient can scarcely remain a moment in
the same posture, and he is wholly without sleep. The pulse at one
time is strong, full, bounding, and not easily compressed, but even in
this acute form it is almost always soft; at least it is very different
from the hardness characteristic of an acute attack of pure phrenitis;
at another time it is oppressed, the stroke giving an impression
directly opposite to that produced by the free and bounding pulse.
But one of the most remarkable modifications of the pulse, one
that is characteristic of an exceedingly acute attack of cerebral
disease, and one with the import of which it is of the highest
consequence to the life of the patient that the practitioner should be
perfectly acquainted the moment he meets with it, is the slow and
intermitting pulse. Whenever, in the onset of fever, a patient is found
with intense head-ache or intense pain in the back and loins, and a
slow pulse, the physician ought to be greatly alarmed at the severity
of the symptoms that are to follow, and if he do not take the most
active measures to break the violence of the disease at this early
period, it will be beyond all control in a day or two, and the patient
will be dead before the fever is well formed in milder cases. The
affection of the brain is sometimes so violent and sudden that the
pulse is not only slow, but intermitting, and the respiration is
suspirious. Frequent and deep sighing is not uncommon in severe
cerebral cases, and it is highly characteristic of intense cerebral
affection; but in such a violent attack as that of which we are now
speaking, the suspirious breathing, even in the very commencement
of the disease, is so great that it cannot be overlooked. This happened
in the case of my friend Dr. Dill, whom I saw a few hours after the
commencement of an attack of one of these intense forms of fever. I
saw him in the afternoon at a public meeting. I met him an hour
afterwards at his own apartment. He was still going about engaged in
his ordinary occupations; but his countenance was pale as death; his
eye was dull and heavy; his mind was confused, and as it seemed to
him paralysed; he had other sensations, which were new to him, and
which were most distressing; but he had no pain: at that time there
was not the slightest pain either in his head or his back or loins:
there was only that general and undefined uneasiness which gave to
him sufficient warning of what was coming, as the slow and
labouring pulse, coupled with the uneasy sensations of which he
71. complained, and the peculiar aspect of his countenance, afforded to
me an abundant confirmation that his apprehensions were just. He
was bled immediately to the extent of twenty ounces: the blood then
drawn was not sizy: he passed a wretched night. I saw him early the
following morning: he had now intense headache; his eye was
already injected; his skin was not hot but burning; his respiration
was suspirious; almost every breath was a sigh, and his pulse was
still slower than on the preceding evening, and was now
intermittent: blood being drawn to a large extent, the crassamentum
was now buffed and cupped; but the detail of the progress of this
instructive case must be postponed until we speak of the treatment of
fever, because it is still more illustrative of the effects produced by
the vigorous application of the appropriate remedies than of the
peculiarity of the symptoms which usher in the attack. It may suffice
for the present to observe that this case affords not only a striking
example of the concurrence of these peculiar symptoms, but also a
decisive proof that pain of the head is far from being the first
symptom that occurs even in the most intense cerebral attack.
In these acute forms of the disease, if the proper remedies be not
vigorously employed, the pain ceases within the fourth day; it rarely
extends beyond the fifth; the pain passes into insensibility; delirium
comes on, sometimes so violent as to require restraint, but delirium
is by no means an invariable concomitant of the other symptoms,
even when these are the most violent: when it is present it is almost
always rapidly followed by muscular tremors, and these by subsultus
tendinum, which now and then usher in general convulsions; but this
last event is rare, and I have never yet seen convulsions
unaccompanied with a particular condition of the brain hereafter to
be described. Sometimes the muscular tremors succeed immediately
to the transition of the pain into insensibility, while the insensibility
rapidly increases to stupor, and that to profound coma. The
breathing is occasionally as stertorous as it is in apoplexy, but this is
also rare, and when it does occur, is probably dependent on a
peculiar condition of the brain hereafter to be pointed out. Together
with these there is a concurrence of a greater or a lesser number of
the symptoms enumerated at page 107, but the particular
combinations that are found most usually to accompany particular
conditions of the brain, it will be most instructive to state in
connexion with the pathology.
72. In synochus with acute cerebral disease there is less indication of
thoracic and abdominal affection than in the subacute form, because
the intensity of the cerebral disease obscures the signs of
derangement in the other organs; but the signs of their derangement
are never absent, although they are less obtrusive, and they trace in
indelible characters proofs of their activity in the ravages they
commit upon their structures in which they have their seat.
Such is the course of synochus under different degrees of violence.
When it is combined with subacute cerebral affection, that course is
usually terminated in from three to six weeks; when with acute
cerebral affection, in from seven to ten days.
As an illustration of each form of the disease, as it is commonly
met with in practice, I subjoin the following cases.
Case I.
John Colebert, æt. 28, admitted into the Fever Hospital August 1,
1828.
Attacked five days ago with chilliness, alternating with heat, pains
of limbs, head-ache, and sense of weakness. At present complains of
pain of head, with slight giddiness; pains of limbs, especially of back
and lower extremities; skin moderately warm; tongue loaded with
white fur; much thirst; three stools; respiration natural; no cough, no
uneasiness in chest; no epigastric or abdominal tenderness on full
pressure; pulse 96, soft.
6th. Skin natural; pain of head gone; pain of back and limbs
continues; slept better; tongue more clean; three stools; pulse 102.
7th. Pain of head not returned; pain of limbs better; tongue still
cleaning; three stools; pulse 96.
9th. Pain of limbs gone; tongue nearly clean; two stools; pulse 84.
10th. Convalescent.
13th. Dismissed cured.
Case II.
George Walker, aged 17. Admitted May 5th, 1828.
73. Six days ago seized with shivering, succeeded by heat, loss of
strength, and pain of head. At present complains especially of head-
ache; ardent thirst; no pain of chest; no cough; no pain of abdomen,
back, or extremities; skin cool; face natural; tongue, except at the
point, covered with a thick dirty fur; much thirst; no appetite; sleeps
badly; bowels costive, having had no stool for the last three days;
pulse 98, of good strength.
7th. Heat of skin nearly natural; pain of head almost gone; no pain
of limbs; tongue still much loaded; some thirst; three stools; pulse
72; slept much better.
8th. Tongue much less loaded; less thirst; five stools; pulse 60.
11th. Convalescent.
14th. Return of head-ache, and, on the day following, the tongue
again became white; but these symptoms disappeared the succeeding
day, and, on the 27th, he was dismissed cured.
These two cases afford fair specimens of the combination of
symptoms, and of the degree of their severity, in the synochus of
London, as it occurs in its mildest form.
Case III.
Emma Gladish. Admitted into the hospital on the 12th day of
fever. Attack commenced with usual symptoms. The pain in the
head, which had been severe for some time, had entirely subsided on
the day of her admission. The mind was now quite indistinct; she
could scarcely answer any question that was put to her; the eyes were
dull and heavy; she had no sleep; there was great restlessness, and
occasionally wandering delirium; there was no tenderness of
abdomen; the tongue was red, furred and dry; the stools were passed
in bed; the pulse 105, of good power.
13th. Sleep rather more tranquil; less wandering; mind a little
more distinct; stools still passed in bed; pulse 100.
14th. Much noise through the night; occasionally started out of
disturbed sleep with screaming; tongue red, glazed and dry; stools
passed in bed; pulse 96.
15th. Rather more sleep; talkative delirium; tongue somewhat
cleaner; pulse 100.
74. 16th. Longer and more tranquil sleep; mind more distinct;
expression of eyes still dull and heavy; tongue more clean, more
moist; stools only partly passed in bed.
17th. More sleep than on the preceding night; mind still more
distinct; complains to-day of some tenderness of abdomen on
pressure; tongue nearly clean; two stools no longer passed in bed;
pulse fallen to 72.
19th. Slept well; mind clearer; eyes more animated; expression of
countenance brighter; other symptoms the same.
26th. Continues to improve; skin cool, soft, and moist; pulse 78.
27th. Convalescent; but the convalescence was slow and tedious, as
it almost always is after so severe an attack of cerebral disease; she
was dismissed cured on the 40th day from the commencement of the
attack. The reports of the 15th, 16th, and 17th days illustrate very
clearly and strikingly the changes which have already been stated to
indicate recovery.
Case IV.
Elizabeth Price, æt. 26, servant; admitted on 11th day of disease.
Attacked with ordinary symptoms of fever: at present complains of
very severe head-ache; face flushed; intolerance of light; some
deafness; mind confused during night; visions of various kinds, such
as “waves of the sea rolling,” appear occasionally before her with
great vividness; had been on sea four days before she became ill; skin
warm; sense of general soreness; abdomen rather hard, but not
tender; tongue furred, rather red; much thirst; no appetite; scarcely
any sleep, and, when she does, dreams of a frightful nature interrupt
her rest; pulse 114, intermittent, of good power, but easily
compressed; bowels constipated. C. C. ad ℥xviij. nuchæ. Abradat.
Capillitium. Lot. Gelid. cap. Haust. Sennæ Sal. c. m.
12th. More sensible since cupping; mind still confused; occasional
wandering; scarcely any sleep; pulse 124, sharp, yet easily
compressed.
14th. Quiet night, with considerable sleep; head giddy and slightly
painful; respiration hurried, apparently cerebral; pupils active;
tongue dry; much thirst; pulse 123. Empl. Lyttæ cap.
75. 15th. Much screaming; great restlessness during night; complains
much of head-ache; pupils active; urine copious, but passed in bed;
all the stools passed in bed; pulse 108, easily compressed; has visions
before her almost constantly; head very hot. Four leeches have been
applied to the temples this morning without relief. Affus. Frigid. cap.
℞. Hydrar. Submuriat. gr. ij. Pulv. Scillæ, gr. j. Pulv. Antimon. gr. iij.
M. sumat 4tâ q. h.
16th. No screaming; head less painful, especially when in half-
erect posture; mind quite sensible now, but much wandering
occasionally; pulse 120, feeble; five stools passed in bed.
24th. No material change until this day; sleep now greatly
improved; mind much more itself; tongue beginning to clean; pulse
93; ptyalism.
28th. Ptyalism continues; feels greatly better; appetite returning.
From this period she continued to improve, although with several
threatenings of relapse; the convalescence was slow and precarious,
but she ultimately left the hospital quite well, though not until the
60th day from the commencement of the fever.
Case V.
Mary Sullivan, æt. 36. Admitted on 14th day of disease;
complaint commenced with shivering; pains in the limbs; severe
head-ache. Complains now of violent pain of the head; face pallid;
expression depressed; scarcely any sleep; abdomen tender on
pressure; only one stool for eleven days; tongue foul and dry; pulse
81, not strong; complains, also, of pain under right mamma,
preventing inspiration and decubitus. V.S. ad ℥xij. Lotio Gelida cap.
Abrad. Capillitium.
15th. Blood with firm buff; pain of head not at all relieved; pain of
back, sides, and abdomen severe; no delirium; no sleep; pulse 78,
pretty strong. Hirudines viij. temporibus. Pt. Med.
16th. Pain of head much relieved; slept very much better; pulse 66,
full and strong.
17th. Pain of head returned, exceedingly severe over the fore-part;
pulse 66, full and strong. C.C. ad ℥xij. nuchæ. Pulv. Aper. Mit. h. s.
Ol. Ricini c. m.
76. 18th. Pain of head gone; countenance more natural; tongue more
clean and moist; pulse 76, more soft. Pt. Med.
20th. Pain of head returned; mind confused; pulse 60, strong and
full. C.C. ad ℥viij. nuchæ. Pt. Med.
21st. Pain of head gone; mind confused; pulse 66, pretty strong.
22d. Pain of head returned, but in a slighter degree; mind more
confused and dull; scarcely any sleep; tongue more foul; pulse 72,
soft. Pt.
24th. No longer conscious of pain; mind quite indistinct; lies
prostrate on the back perfectly helpless; incapable of turning on the
side; occasional retching; some tenderness of abdomen on pressure;
pulse 72, strong and full.
25th. Much restlessness; aspect of countenance greatly depressed;
stools passed in bed; pulse 75.
26th. Perfectly senseless; almost constant moaning; extreme
restlessness; difficult deglutition; pulse 120.
27th. Not spoken since last report; lies prostrate on back; eyes half
open and injected; pulse 102, feeble.
29th. Died.
If the reader can doubt of the condition of the brain in this case, he
is requested to turn to the pathology, where the morbid appearances
on dissection are detailed. Slowness of the pulse, with severe and
obstinate pain in the head, attended with confusion of mind, is
always a highly dangerous-symptom: it invariably denotes intense
cerebral disease. Whenever there is such a struggle, as this case
exhibits, between the physician and the disease, the disease is sure to
conquer. For if the physician, terrified at the name or the duration of
the malady, while he resolve to use the lancet, hesitate to employ it to
the extent of subduing the disease by the first bleedings, the patient
is lost. The partial relief afforded by partial measures is most
delusive. The malady speedily recovers its lost strength: the patient
never does. There is no practitioner who is capable of being taught by
experience that can reflect on the history and progress of such a case
as this, on the temporary relief afforded by such treatment, on its
ultimate failure, and on the appearances presented on dissection,
without regretting that more blood was not taken on the 15th and
16th days, and without at the same time resolving, that the aid he
77. offers in future, under similar circumstances, shall be more decisive.
The diminution of the pain of the head on the 22d, accompanied with
increasing confusion and dullness, with a tongue growing more and
more foul, and with a pulse only at 72, might well excite alarm; and
accordingly, on the following day, the case was utterly without hope.
78. II. Synochus Gravior with Thoracic
Affection.
There is probably no case of fever, however slight, in which the
mucous membrane of the bronchi remains in a perfectly sound state.
A certain affection of this membrane, the nature of which will be
stated hereafter, appears to be peculiar, to fever, and there is reason
to believe that the acutest thoracic affection which is at the same
time truly febrile, differs from the mildest case of fever, in which
there may be no visible sign of any thoracic disease whatever, only in
the degree in which this organ is affected. Sometimes it happens,
however, that this membrane is implicated in a more than ordinary
degree; and when it is so, it gives rise to peculiar symptoms,
constituting the case thoracic. The severity of these thoracic, is not
always in proportion to the severity of the febrile symptoms, in like
manner as there may be the most intense febrile symptoms, without
any indication of thoracic disease: but whenever the thoracic
symptoms are sufficiently intense to become prominent, and
especially when they occur early or attend on the commencement of
fever, they invariably and very considerably aggravate the general
febrile symptoms. In these prominent thoracic affections, then, two
things happen; first, the symptoms properly constituting the febrile
train are modified, and, secondly, new symptoms are added to this
train, namely, those which indicate derangement in the respiratory
organs.
The new and peculiar symptoms to which a moderately acute and
an early thoracic affection gives rise, are the following; namely—
Pain in the chest, sometimes severe, sometimes only slight; sense
of stricture or dyspnœa; inability to expand the chest by a full
inspiration without pain or uneasiness; cough frequently aggravating
the pain; sometimes dry, sometimes accompanied with frothy
mucous expectoration. Respiration sometimes slow and heavy, at
other times, on the contrary, short and quick; never natural: perhaps
the physician may detect thoracic disease in the more obscure, and
measure its extent in the more obvious cases, by observing the
79. manner in which the patient breathes, better than by any other single
means. The altered respiration is very frequently accompanied with
that peculiar noise in breathing which is termed “mucous rattle.”
The pulse, in the commencement of this open and decided chest
affection, may not be above 80 or 90; it is hardly ever sharp; it is
generally weak; now and then it is full and of good strength; but
whatever other character it may possess it is almost always soft. In a
few days, as the disease advances, it uniformly rises in frequency and
becomes weaker. Towards the end of the disease it is almost always
hurried and feeble, although cases occasionally occur in which it is
observed at this period to become suddenly slow and intermittent.
The tongue is usually foul; commonly moist; but, in severe affections
and in their advanced stage, it sometimes becomes dry. The skin is
often moderately warm, but it is never intensely hot: it is much more
common for it to be cool, and to be of a more dusky colour than
natural.
Such are the usual conditions of the respiratory and circulating
systems and of the tongue, the great index of the state of the mucous
membrane of the alimentary canal, when the thoracic affection
increases so as to become prominent and acute. The manner in
which it influences the cerebral affection is commonly by hastening
the period at which the pain of the head lapses into confusion and
stupor. Early insensibility, assuming the form of a muddled or
exceedingly confused state of mind, is a very constant symptom of
more than ordinary thoracic affection. Accordingly, the delirium
which succeeds or which accompanies this state is always low
muttering talkativeness, or incoherent wandering, rather than
violent delirium, which last is seldom, if ever, found in combination
with severe thoracic disease. The pathological condition of the lung
perfectly accounts for this modification of the condition of the brain,
as will be shewn hereafter.
Case VI.
The following case not only shews the insidious manner in which
thoracic disease may come on and the severe form it may ultimately
assume; but also, the extent of disease from which it is possible that
recovery may take place.
80. Welcome to Our Bookstore - The Ultimate Destination for Book Lovers
Are you passionate about books and eager to explore new worlds of
knowledge? At our website, we offer a vast collection of books that
cater to every interest and age group. From classic literature to
specialized publications, self-help books, and children’s stories, we
have it all! Each book is a gateway to new adventures, helping you
expand your knowledge and nourish your soul
Experience Convenient and Enjoyable Book Shopping Our website is more
than just an online bookstore—it’s a bridge connecting readers to the
timeless values of culture and wisdom. With a sleek and user-friendly
interface and a smart search system, you can find your favorite books
quickly and easily. Enjoy special promotions, fast home delivery, and
a seamless shopping experience that saves you time and enhances your
love for reading.
Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and
personal growth!
ebookgate.com