Introduction: Controversies in Health Care Innovation. Service, Technology and Organization.

The chapters of this volume help answer the question: what is the role of controversies in innovation? Being anchored in different theoretical frameworks (organization studies, theories of industrial networks, and infrastructure theory), studies in this volume converge in taking a practice- and process-oriented approach to innovation, and focus on some controversial aspects relating to how innovation (in the forms of a new medical artefact, an IT system, a new organizational solution or a public-driven change/reform) unfolds in practice. While controversies might be perceived as barriers to creative change and a hindrance to innovation, observations reported in this volume produce a somewhat different view – that controversies can also have an energizing role.