In this lecture, I'll draw on Greenhalgh and colleagues far-reaching systematic review of the literature on innovation diffusion. To examine some notable organizational features that research studies have found to be related to innovation adoption. What features of an organization do you think helps adoption of an innovation? Let's start by focusing on an organization's structural characteristics. Greenhalgh's review shows that there are structural characteristics that have been associated with innovativeness and innovation adoption. For example, the degree to which an organization is specialized, the attitude senior management has towards change, and whether there are resources available to experiment with. How do you think the organization's attitude towards change affects the adoption of innovations? As you can imagine, this does have an impact. The presence of strong leadership, a clear strategic vision, good managerial relations, visionary staff located in key positions. A climate conducive to experimentation, and risk-taking are all positively associated with innovativeness and spread of innovation. What about the organization's absorptive capacity? That is to say the organization's ability to identify, capture, share, reframe, and recodify new knowledge. This has shown to be important, since it basically means that the organization is capable of doing new things, and can incorporate new knowledge. Greenhalgh notes, however, that what constitutes new knowledge is actually a contested and socially constructed process. You'll touch upon this in more detail in this specialization. These characteristics have all shown to be related to adoption of an innovation. But why should you avoid characterizing organizations only by these features? Note down some ideas before I go further. These features on their own do not guarantee an organization's innovativeness. There's a risk that by characterizing organizations by single features, such as the size or turnover, or the degree of functional specialization, that the complexity of innovation and its adoption will be overly simplified. These structural determinants cannot really be treated as variables on their own, isolated from the many other important factors that influence innovation and adoption. The importance of all of these features and determinants will be moderated by the features of the innovation itself, which you learnt about previously. Does the process through which innovations are adopted also have an effect? The answer is yes. The importance of all these determinants will also be moderated by this. For example, you can imagine that the decision by an individual clinician to use a product or technological innovation is very different to the decision to adopt an innovation across an entire organization. It's important to not generalize between these two, as they will require different things, and have different challenges. One might be unplanned and informal left to market forces or individual choice, and the other could be planned and formal through deliberate and negotiated commissioning, or managerial influence. Either way though, the organizational context will play an important part in the adoption process. So together, we've looked at some organizational and context features that might influence the readiness to adopt an innovation. Think about where you are. Can new innovations be adopted easily? Why, or why not?