Abstract
Both conventional wisdom and some of the literature in this area tell us that public organizations and services find it hard to innovate. We present a case study on the impact of a third sector intra-service innovation on the interservices’ network of a regional child welfare agency. The innovation was implemented in 2010 and the follow-up presented in this chapter was completed in 2014. The innovation consisted of the introduction of a new tool for the direct, systematic observation of children’s behaviour and attitudes. Residential youth workers, an important part of the child welfare agency’s workforce, introduced the new tool in order to improve the quality of their contribution to the information flow on young people in residential care. The follow-up research allowed us to recognize that the introduction of a new tool, while improving team work performance and reducing interpersonal and team conflicts at the intra-service’s educative service level, highlighted an important asymmetry between service providers in the child welfare agency network with regard to the provision of information.
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Notes
- 1.
The costs of the investigation were partly covered by a local private foundation (CARITRO, Trento). Data were collected in February–May 2014.
- 2.
Data referred to open, axial and selective coding of focus group transcripts.
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Acknowledgements
This study was supported by the CARITRO Foundation, Trento, Italy, in 2013: Trento University (principal investigator Prof. Olga Bombardelli), Verona University (investigator Prof. Monica Pedrazza), CeRP Milan and Trento (Dr. Simona Taccani and Dr. Cristina Zorzato).
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Pedrazza, M., Sartori, R., Berlanda, S. (2017). Inter-professional Collaboration: An Evaluation Study. In: Russo-Spena, T., Mele, C., Nuutinen, M. (eds) Innovating in Practice. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43380-6_21
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