Page 197 -

186 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

BOX 9.1 Continued
There is a feeling that they will lose control over the patients which makes
them not very responsive at first’.
To make matters worse, medical therapeutics represented a major
departure from Healthco’s, long-established, diagnostics imaging business.
As a result, the PCT project was not really recognized within the mainstream
structure of Healthco – being described as an ‘orphan project’ and ‘not
really what we do’. This meant that the UK team had little formal authority
over the divisional managers or sales staff that they needed to engage in
the innovation process in order to communicate and sell the technology to
potential users.
In this very difficult political and business context, the strategy of
the UK team centred on raising awareness of the prostate cancer dis-
ease, and brachytherapy as a treatment, rather than on promoting their
particular technology. An important aspect of this was to cultivate a
‘community or care’ around brachytherapy innovation. Thus, in the
words of the project leader, the PCT project was about ‘collaboration,
creating communities, engagement and cooperation, enabling choice
of treatments both by the doctors and the patients’. This discourse of
‘collaboration’ and ‘community of care’ was used quite deliberately
by Medico to frame the team’s activities in promoting brachytherapy
amongst medical professionals and managers in the regional businesses,
with metaphors such as ‘creating a stage’ and ‘creating a shared sense
of desire’ being employed on a frequent basis by the Project Leader.
The Medico team also appealed to personal aspirations of individuals
to become involved with ‘the first Medico product targeted at a cure’
rather than just at diagnosis.
The PCT team’s innovative activities were multi-fold. First, they assisted
hospitals in establishing ‘Centres of Excellence’ where multidisciplinary
teams could treat patients using brachytherapy techniques and where
other professionals could be given ‘hands-on’ training. Second, most
of the marketing budget actually went to developing training and
education materials for medical professionals and Medico sales people.
Third, specific events were organized to raise awareness amongst the
medical communities about the brachytherapy innovation. Key opinion
leaders (e.g. senior medical professionals) were identified and cultivated
to address such events, and to speak on behalf of the therapy’s success.
One such event invited senior medical professionals across disciplines
to a weekend meeting in a country hotel to discuss the advantages and
disadvantages of brachytherapy. Significantly, an outcome of this was that
this group established their own multidisciplinary professional network
charged with identifying common standards for brachytherapy treatment
across Europe. Finally, information flows were actively managed. For

6/5/09 7:20:34 AM
9780230_522015_10_cha09.indd 186
9780230_522015_10_cha09.indd 186 6/5/09 7:20:34 AM