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Innovation, the successful exploitation of new ideas, is an important driver of economic growth. The traditional view of innovation as a pipeline process based around commercialising scientific or technological invention has today been replaced by a broader understanding that innovation is not necessarily linear and reaches far beyond the production of products to be focused on successful market outcomes. Based on the authors' experience of innovation policy development in Scotland, this paper concludes that there needs to be a dramatic change in approach to innovation policy if Scotland is to sustain long-term economic growth and competitive advantage.

Rating tools for the built environment were designed to engage consumers and enhance sustainability and resilience. However, the intended outcomes of these rating systems appear to have limited implementation in the residential new housing market in Australia. The purpose of this paper is to investigate consumers’ motivations and experiences who have purchased houses that are situated in a sustainability-based certified development and will have been required to comply with mandatory dwelling certification.

The paper explores the awareness and perception of sustainability ratings and whether the motivations for purchasing in the sustainably certified development have heightened their awareness of sustainability and the resilience of new housing. This has been investigated through a pilot study of consumers who have purchased land in a certified estate and built a new home, through an online survey.

The findings reveal that the rating systems are at present not having the desired influence as first thought; that is, to inform consumers of the sustainability of a dwelling or property and to instigate trust of the environmental credentials of the property.

This illuminating case study of participants who have purchased a sustainable rated development demonstrates that regardless of their concern for environmental issues, consumers have both low awareness and trust in the ratings. Despite this, consumers do seek value from these credentials to the overall property.

This study aims to illustrate the disconnect in engagement between developers, builders and new home buyers in relation to sustainability certification and implementation.

The provision of telecare for older adults in England is increasingly being facilitated by care navigators in the non-statutory sector. The purpose of this paper is to explore the experiences of care navigators when assessing older adults for telecare and to understand what contextual and organisational factors impact on their practice.

A purposeful sample of care navigators and telecare installers was selected. Care navigators were recruited from five non-statutory organisations. In order to provide an insight into telecare provision by this sector, telecare installers were also recruited. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 participants covering: role, training, assessment, reviews, installation, suitability, impact, aims, outcomes, and organisational structure. Interview data were analysed using the framework approach.

Five main themes emerged from the analysis: responsiveness, autonomy, knowledge exchange, evolving practice, and sustaining performance.

This study included a small sample, and was only based in one local authority, focusing on the experience of care navigators in only one sector.

The findings suggest that strategic placement of care navigators could support the demand for telecare assessment to facilitate discharges from hospital. This study highlights the perception of home assessment as a gold standard of practice for care navigators. In order to develop a more sustainable model for care navigators’ capacity to work within hospital teams and provide home assessments needs further consideration.

This study is one of the first to explore the role of the care navigator and their involvement in the provision of telecare for older adults.

A primary impetus of the modern hospice movement was the disparity, during the later 20th century, between the care provided to persons with illnesses considered “curable” and the treatment – or lack of it – accorded the incurably or terminally ill. In its transformation from a reform-oriented, interdisciplinary response to the needs of the dying to an integrated component of the American healthcare system, hospice care's original mission, target population, and modality of service delivery were all significantly altered in ways that generated new disparities in access to “death with dignity.” This chapter attempts to trace the political, economic, and institutional dimensions of this transformation as reflected in the experiences of one Northeastern hospice during a 6-month period in 2001. Using an analytic approach known as institutional ethnography (IE), the authors focus on the work of the Hospice's Interdisciplinary Group (IDG) to uncover the linkages between local problems in the delivery of hospice care and extra-local sites of power and constraint at the mezzo- and macrolevels of the American healthcare system. The significance of these linkages for patients, frontline workers, and other stakeholders are interpreted from several perspectives. Implications for change are discussed.

This paper considers an undergraduate student's coming to, and use of, an ethnographic approach as a particularly appropriate way in which to investigate aspects of life in a British hospital school. Such schools occupy a liminal position with regard to education policy and provision. There is a paucity of research on hospital schools and particularly of the experiences and perceptions of teachers who work in them. This lack of research has implications for policy development. The paper therefore offers some rare insights into one of these schools. It also gives insights into how ethnography can challenge taken for granted assumptions.

An ethnographic participant observer approach was adopted.

This paper gives insights into how ethnography can challenge researchers' taken for granted assumptions as well as offering illustration of some aspects of life in schools.

Although there is an extensive literature on uses of ethnography, this approach has rarely been applied to hospital schools. The paper makes a small step towards addressing this lack.