Knowledge management in Italian Research Hospitals
The path from scientific research to impact in an Italian Scientific Institute for Research, Hospitalization and Healthcare – IRCCS: a knowledge-based perspective
IRCCS hospitals (Italian Scientific Institute for Research, Hospitalization and Healthcare) are the excellence of the Italian research and the Italian National Health Service Systems with high standards of healthcare research and staff training. These types of hospitals are part of health innovation systems, and their role in the consumption and implementation of innovations – both technical and clinical – has also been covered extensively in the health management, health economics, and health policy fields. Being responsible for a large amount of knowledge creation, IRCCSs play a key role in the innovation systems and the new challenge for Research Managers and Administrators (RMAs) is to improve the processes by which knowledge is generated, communicated and used. Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs) can be important in bringing such new knowledge to an upper level of economic exploitability and generating impact. In this context, it is necessary to determine a strategy for enhancing the knowledge management of research output, mapping all projects’ activities, understanding the specific needs of researchers during their long path from research to impact, and how to boost them. Our pilot study aims at developing and initially validating a brief questionnaire to explore the diffusion of the knowledge developed inside the hospital, the potential benefits of having a vertical integrated TTO and the relationships between TTOs and researchers’ needs. We provide an initial mono-centric description of the knowledge management, preliminary identifying clusters of researchers' engagement and identifying an initial theory-grounded framework for guiding future research endeavours in the field of knowledge and innovation management in IRCCS environments, potentially overlapping other European realities.
