Organisational configuration for innovation: the case of palliative care

This paper reports the development and testing of an organisational configuration to support the management and delivery of innovative patient care practices in multidisciplinary palliative care teams in Australia. This is part of an ongoing research project seeking to understand how palliative care organisations, a complex and dynamic environment, manage multidisciplinary patient care teams to enable produce innovative responses to changing patient requirements. Results reported here describe the development of a theoretical configuration for these organisations, based in a range of literature, that is tested at interview in three palliative care organisations. Previous results of the research are then presented in discussion to demonstrate their relationship to configuration. It is suggested that understanding configuration is a first step in understanding these innovative organisations.