Researchers: Anat Drach-Zahavy¹

Background: Only scant evidence exists on factors that facilitate the success in of innovation implementation of nursing champions.

Objectives: 1. To characterize the innovation in terms of usefulness, novelty, radicalism, and spread within the unit.
2. To depict the nurse-champions' ego network measures (density, homophily, the strength of ties);
3. To examine the relations among the ego network measures and innovation success.

Method: Cross-sectional design. The sample consisted of 94 nursing champions, and their projects. The innovation of the projects was assessed by 4 criteria: radicalism, novelty, spread, and usefulness, using different raters. The independent variables consisted of network analysis' measures: the density, strength of ties among network members, and homophily.

Findings: Four categories of change were identified: quality control, administrative, service, and human resource. Changes oriented towards service and human resources improvement were evaluated as more radical and novel in comparison to administrative and quality improvement changes. Bottom-up changes were evaluated as more radical and novel than top-down ones. In addition, network measures were associated with the characteristics of the innovation. For example, spread was associated with the network's density, duration of relationship, and homophily in mother's tongue; and usefulness with strength of consultation and homophily; whereas radicalism and novelty were negatively associated with measures of homophily.

Conclusions: A dense network with strong relations facilitates the spread and the usefulness of the innovation, whereas heterogenous networks, that allows importing ideas from the units' environment facilitates radical and novel innovations.

Recommendations: Health care organization should encourage champions to choose project that are in line with the specific needs and context of the unit. Champions should be trained how to develop a social network that can facilitate the success of the innovation.

Research end date: 11/2017