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Reviews the latest learning and development books across the globe and pinpoints practical implications.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Innovation is essential for organizations and individuals to meet the challenges of global change and competition. This is an easy to read, lively book that delivers on its promise to make innovation understandable and accessible. Scott Anthony writes in a conversational style and uses footnotes to add insights and personal thoughts. The book begins by explaining that the ability to innovate can be improved by studying and applying patterns. This idea, adopted from Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School professor and author of The Innovators's Dilemma, serves as a guide for the book.

Provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to digest format.

There is increasing emphasis on caring for people with intellectual disabilities in the least restrictive, ideally community settings. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore the risk factors considered by clinicians involved in discharging people from secure services.

The views of five senior clinicians were sought in semi structured interviews. Data were analysed thematically.

Themes related to risk assessment, risk management, and multidisciplinary and multiagency working. Illustrative quotes are used to evidence themes.

This study described the risk assessment and management factors considered during the discharge of patients from secure to community services, which are of direct relevance to multiple stakeholders post-Winterbourne.

Challenges when facilitating discharge were highlighted, such as ongoing risk management issues, or unexpected discharge from tribunals, and how these were addressed, via the development of extensive risk assessment and management processes, and interdisciplinary and interagency working.

Researchers, policymakers and hospital managers often encounter numerous quality measures when assessing hospital quality. The purpose of this paper is to address the challenge of summarising, interpreting and comparing multiple quality measures across different quality dimensions by proposing a simple method of constructing a composite quality index. The method is applied to hospital administrative data to demonstrate its use in analysing hospital performance.

Logistic and fixed effects regression analyses are applied to secondary admitted patient data from all hospitals in the state of Victoria, Australia for the period 2000/2001–2011/2012.

The derived composite quality index was used to rank hospital performance and to assess changes in state-wide average hospital quality over time. Further regression analyses found private hospitals, day hospitals and non-acute hospitals were associated with higher composite quality, while small hospitals were associated with lower quality.

The method will enable policymakers and hospital managers to better monitor the performance of hospitals. It allows quality to be related to other attributes of hospitals such as size and volume, and enables policymakers and managers to focus on hospitals with relevant characteristics such that quantity and quality changes can be better understood, monitored and acted upon.

A simple method of constructing a composite quality is an indispensable practical tool in tracking the quality of hospitals when numerous measures are used to capture different aspects of quality. The derived composite quality can be used to summarise hospital performance and to identify factors associated with quality via regression analyses.

The current downturn may offer a unique opportunity for astute corporate leadership to undertake the kind of innovation that disrupts markets, channels or even industries says Scott Anthony, president of innovation consultancy Innosight, co‐founded by disruptive innovation guru, Clayton Christensen. This paper aims to investigate this issue.

In this interview, Anthony reviews how the tenets of disruptive innovation – identify the job the customer cannot get done, look for innovative ways to get that job done, focus on experimentation and learning – apply in a recessionary environment.

Anthony warns that in recessions, a company may think has a choice – risk innovation or choose the safety of survival mode. But it is a false choice. The only way to survive is to innovate.

Anthony explains that “Scarcity is a great innovation enabler. Lean teams have to focus on the most critical issues.”

Anthony's golden rule: “The best way to develop disruptive capabilities is to start small and learn as you go.”

This Masterclass considers the lessons of two recent important books have contrasting but complementary insights to offer to company leaders and strategists on how to improve the odds for developing successful innovations in response to game changes in markets.”

In Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today’s Business While Creating the Future (2017), disruptive innovation experts, Scott Anthony, Clark Gilbert and Mark Johnson offer corporate leaders a “dual transformation” template for simultaneously repositioning the traditional core business in the face of disruptive change, while also creating new businesses to harness the growth potential typically unlocked by such disruption. In The Power of Little Ideas: A Low-Risk, High-Reward Approach to Innovation (2017), innovation guru, David Robertson, and his collaborator, Kent Lineback, offer companies a “third way” for coping with historic market inflections by innovating around a core product to make it more compelling, rather than having to choose between attempting the radical or incremental innovation of the product itself.

The most powerful message that both books featured in this masterclass have to offer is that while it may be true, as they go on to observe, that large companies can’t innovate faster than the market, they can learn “to innovate better than the market,” through more imaginative use of legacy products, platforms and assets.

A “third way” to cope with market disruption is based on innovating around the core product, by surrounding it with a set of complementary innovations, rather than re-featuring the product itself. All of the complementary innovations operate together with the product “as a system or family to satisfy a compelling promise to the customer.”

Both Dual Transformation and The Power of Little Ideas, present different, but far from mutually exclusive, innovation strategies that can help many more great companies to survive disruptive competition.

In the absence of central guidance on the development of integrated primary care organisations, a diversity of models is emerging. This paper examines the management arrangements of Scottish local health care co‐operatives (LHCCs). A postal questionnaire survey of all 79 LHCCs was conducted. The response rate was 35 per cent. LHCCs set up management bodies and created workgroups. Stakeholder representation was not socially inclusive: attempts to engage patients and local communities were limited and need to be stepped up to increase responsiveness and accountability to local health care users. LHCCs were also vehicles for local ownership and control of health care provision. To facilitate co‐operation among participating practices, LHCCs need to focus on issues of leadership, organisation, and involvement in decision making. Finally, management expenditure per capita was comparable with that of other types of integrated primary care organisations.

Scepticism about organizations has become an integral part of the field organizational theory. This article aspires to develop through historical analysis a taxonomy of organizational scepticism. Though scepticism of all types have generic traits, there are three distinct types of scepticism: premodern, modern and postmodern scepticism. Premodern scepticism attacks the modern organizational by stressing concepts grounded in nature and tradition. Modern sceptics attack the optimism of managerialism about organizations. Postmodern sceptics stress that technological developments, economic self interest, and irrationality will be the eventual undoing of modern organization. Organizational scepticism is now so pervasive that it should be treated as an integral part of the field.

Risk management is becoming an increasingly important topic in healthcare. The dangers of conducting clinical trials were brought to the attention of the public by the media in 2006 with the TGN1412 phase 1 clinical trial. Clinical trials are however important for the development of new drugs. There are a number of gatekeepers for the safety of trials but risk assessment is now becoming an important aspect. This paper aims to focus on clinical trials.

A new risk assessment tool was developed to collect data relating to the contributory factors and control measures associated with clinical trials. The responses to a series of 29 questions are then scored to inform a risk rating for the clinical trial

The theoretical model was converted into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with drop down boxes for the responses to the questions. Research management staff have found the tool simple and quick to use. A printout of the assessment can be placed in the study folder as evidence. Highlighted risks are then flagged up to the organisation's corporate risk register and an action plan developed.

The tool has been utilised to assess risks of all research projects from educational studies such as MSc, PhD to medical device trials and drug trials. Furthermore it has assessed risks in the acute, primary care and mental health sectors.