Value for all? Dynamics of partnership formation in occupational healthcare collaboration

Interorganizational relationships take advantages of surrounding networks to create value. However, there is little processual understanding of how cooperative partnerships ‘work’ in healthcare collaboration. From the value creation perspective, their mobilization, management and maintenance are challenging. To understand the value of cooperative partnerships, we explore the dynamics of partnership formation in occupational healthcare collaboration. The empirical data is based on a two-year qualitative case study examining e-value co-creation in healthcare. The research data was obtained through a participatory action research method. We facilitated and followed up a developmental process of the partnership between an occupational health service company and its customer organization. This partnership aimed to add strategic value through the co-creation method to improve the well-being of employees and to promote eHealth solutions. In analyzing the data, we adopted a process orientation that allowed us to explore dynamics in partnership formation and its e-value co-creation. We used Ring and Van de Ven’s [1] framework to examine how cooperative interorganizational relationship develops through the stages of negotiation, commitment and execution. Our longitudinal case study analysis reveals how interaction, mutual sensemaking and institutional logics affect partnership and its value creation. The results show that the formation of a cooperative partnership is a challenging inter-organizational learning process. Our study demonstrates three tensions characterizing the dynamics of partnership: asymmetrical roles and positions between partners (customer and service provider) in co-creation, exploitation of institutionalized practices versus the exploration of new methods for collaboration, and tradeoffs between the operational logic and the co-creation logic. To create value for all in cooperative partnership, we emphasize the necessity of dialogue, mutual trust, interorganizational learning and processual feedback of accomplishments. At its best, cooperative partnership in healthcare collaboration can challenge existing practices of service provision and develop new concepts, roles and tools to promote health and well-being at workplaces through co-creation as a working method in occupational health collaboration.

How to Start Up a National Wildlife Health Surveillance Programme

Whilst multiple countries in Europe have wildlife health surveillance (WHS) programmes, they vary in scope. In many countries, coordinated general surveillance at a national scale is not conducted and the knowledge of wildlife health status in Europe remains limited. Learning lessons from countries with established systems may help others to effectively implement WHS schemes. In order to facilitate information exchange, the WHS Network of the European Wildlife Disease Association organised a workshop to both collate knowledge and experience from countries that had started or expanded WHS programmes and to translate this information into practical recommendations. Presentations were given by invited representatives of European countries with different WHS levels. Events that led to the start-up and fostered growth spurts of WHS were highlighted, including action plan creation, partnership formation, organisation restructuring and appraisal by external audit. Challenges to programme development, such as a lack of funding, data sharing, infrastructural provision and method harmonisation, were explored. Recommendations to help overcome key challenges were summarised as: understanding and awareness; cross-sectoral scope; national-scale collaboration; harmonisation of methods; government support; academic support; other funding support; staff expertise and capacity; leadership, feedback and engagement; and threat mitigation and wildlife disease management. This resource may enable the development of WHS programmes in Europe and beyond.

Evaluating distributional regression strategies for modelling self-reported sexual age-mixing

The age dynamics of sexual partnership formation determine patterns of sexually transmitted disease transmission and have long been a focus of researchers studying human immunodeficiency virus. Data on self-reported sexual partner age distributions are available from a variety of sources. We sought to explore statistical models that accurately predict the distribution of sexual partner ages over age and sex. We identified which probability distributions and outcome specifications best captured variation in partner age and quantified the benefits of modelling these data using distributional regression. We found that distributional regression with a sinh-arcsinh distribution replicated observed partner age distributions most accurately across three geographically diverse data sets. This framework can be extended with well-known hierarchical modelling tools and can help improve estimates of sexual age-mixing dynamics.

STRUCTURAL PARADIGM OF INNOVATIVE AND INVESTMENT PARTNERSHIP

The article is focused on finding a new and modification of the existing paradigms of the innovative and investment partnership formation. The article studies the perspective key members of innovative partnership, their roles and possible cooperation effects. The attention is focused on the choice of directions of the innovative process realization depending upon the comparative assessment of approaches and the innovation commercialization expenses. The author outlines the direct and indirect form of the innovative partnership: «enterprise — university» and «enterprise — innovative mediator — university». The analysis of the profit-making channels in each chosen type of cooperation is provided. The globalization and capital concentration platforms preceding the integration partnership agreements are outlined and analyzed. To build up a separate adaptive paradigm of the innovative partnership the factors of the inner and outer environment forming the barriers for the realization of successful innovation partnership models are analyzed. It was found that one more factor to be considered when choosing the forms of innovative partnership between the parties concerned is the payback from the innovation commercialization, Its amount will be impacted by the objective factors of the currency depreciation in time, level of the sci-tech progress development, facilitation of the state policy, selected priorities of the national strategies, etc. Concerning the subjective factors, they fall within the variety of behavioral characteristics of an individual. It is stated that the formation of the innovative partnership is closely connected with the regional peculiarity of the location of enterprises, institutions and organizations. It is suggested to outline the innovative export-oriented and innovative import-dependent regions of the country. This feature will cover the possibilities of acquisition of innovations, knowledge and experience, and resources for their realization from the inner and outer markets. One of the factors of the commercial success achievement with the chosen form of the innovative partnership is the Blue Ocean Strategy which will allow studying the market more in detail and find the market niches in need of such new integrative formations. The incorporation of spin-off and spin-out companies is outlined as an efficient direction of the innovative partnership grounds realization. The article was prepared with the application of the following methods: expert appraisal, analysis and synthesis, economic experiment and scientific abstraction as well as graphic and logical methods. Keywords: innovative partnership, innovative process, innovation, business model of the innovative partnership, innovative mediator, innovation commercialization. JEL Classification L26 Formulas: 0; fig.: 3; tabl.: 2; bibl.: 12.

Is Early Partnership Formation Instrumental for Fertility in Germany?

Using panel data from childless respondents of the German Family Panel (pairfam, n=3,802 respondents), this paper investigates whether fertility orientations (biographical orientations with respect to fertility) influence the risk of different partnership transitions among German men and women over the age of 18 (for n=14,572 observation periods between two panel waves). Significant influences are found for both gender and partnership transition types, and are generally stronger among men than women and for the transition to a coresidential as opposed to a romantic partnership. Uncertainty about anticipated fertility has a stronger negative impact on transition risks among men than among women. Results strongly suggest that the early stages of the partnership formation process are instrumental in terms of future fertility in Germany, at least to some degree. This indicates that a more comprehensive conceptualisation and analysis of fertility within the life course paradigm (as suggested by Huinink/Kohli 2014) should consider the impacts of fertility orientations on life course events in other dimensions, especially among men. Viewed more broadly, the results also underline two factors: the role of agency in coordinating life course dimensions in time and space in order to maximise individual welfare; and the importance of considering the impacts that anticipation of future life course events will have, as suggested by different theoretical approaches.

Key Questions for Forming Partnerships: A Review and Research Agenda

Partnerships receive significant attention in public administration scholarship, with the mass of this literature focusing on whether partnerships work, how to make them work, or how they fit into existing institutions (Provan and Milward, 2001; Vigoda, 2002; McGuire, 2006; Thomson and Perry, 2006; Andrews and Entwistle, 2010; McQuaid, 2010; O’Toole, 2015). Although partnership has been used variously by different scholars, in general, partnerships refer to formal arrangements between two or more organizations that are characterized by defined responsibilities, obligations, and/or governance structure, as compared to other forms of cooperative behaviors which may be more informal, unorganized, or involve few obligations. In general, existing scholarship on partnership formation argues that partnerships are a function of resource-exchanges, available partners, or fragmented authorities, and assumes a pragmatic managerial approach to these arrangements (Grady and Chen, 2006; Feiock and Scholz, 2009). However, scholarship is limited in linking these mechanisms together and explaining how organizations go from isolated and autonomous to integrated and interdependent. As such, it is difficult to determine how initial decisions in the partnership process eventually lead to success or failure in collaboration. Furthermore, much of this scholarship is written with a solely academic audience in mind, making difficult for practitioners, non-academics, or non-subject area experts to consume. To remedy this, we use Cohen, March, and Olsen’s (1972) Garbage Can Theory (GCT) of organizational choice as a guiding framework to identify key issues that affect partnerships formation and tie this disjointed set of literature together. We then synthesize these issues into three key questions that can be operationalized by practitioners: 1) is there a problem that cannot be managed unilaterally?; 2) what new capacities are needed?; and 3) what partnership opportunities are there? From this perspective, forming partnerships unfolds in organized anarchies, where decision-makers must sort through ambiguous problems, solutions, and participants in order to determine if partnership is the right choice for their organization. In general, the purpose of this discussion is to identify and examine key issues that likely affect partnership choices made by practitioners and that can provide guidance to those who are considering engaging in collaboration or partnership. Finally, we discuss links between partnership formation and broader understandings of collaborations and networks.

Interfirm Partnerships and Organizational Innovation: Study of SMEs in the Automotive Sector

This study aims to analyze the influence that interfirm partnership motives can have on the implementation of organizational innovation activities. To achieve this aim, a quantitative cross-sectional research design was adopted, surveying owners-managers of small and medium-sized enterprises in the automotive sector. Based on the empirical evidence, the study concludes that the motives for partnership formation are related to organizational innovation activities, but only partially. Of the four main factors for establishing interfirm partnerships (‘Efficiency’, ‘Innovation and learning’, ‘Market opportunities’, ‘Technology and competition’), only the motives associated with the latter were shown to have a positive and significant influence on organizational innovation. Implications for theory and practice are also presented.