Heterogeneous Inter-Organisational IT Innovation Creation: Institutional constraints in a public sector oriented market

This paper reports from a case study of an IT innovation consortium in the field of elderly home healthcare. The circumstance of the consortium we studied includes that it was comprised of small-to-medium sized enterprises and targeted a public sector oriented market. We present six institutional constraints facing the heterogeneous innovation collective in the innovation creation process: procurement boundary spanning, procurement tendering and contracts, operation boundary spanning, procurement rationales, market-driven development, development time misalignment. Three of these constraints have a high degree of novelty to the IS literature on innovation. Further, research focused on the field of IT for elderly home healthcare is addressing lack of widespread IT innovation diffusion by turning to user-centered design that emphasises user needs and usability evaluations. This sound approach needs to be complemented by studies that even more emphasise business conditions and commerciability evaluations at field-level; our study contributes in this regard.