Rothwel's Five Generations

Hospitals, both in the private and public sectors are now heavily reliant on technology, the breakdown of any equipment usually results in delays to services provided to patients and ultimately will affect productivity of a system with simultaneously possible loss of both technical and economic resources. Medical devices maintenance is an important aspect for an efficient health care services, aiming to achieve the highest possible utilization by decreasing the downtime and improving device performance and patient safety. There are many variables that affect the performance of hospital staff and medical devices maintenance is one of them (Rawashdeh). Every day we face pressure from equipment end-users requiring faster, easier and more efficient

Rothwel (1994), identified five generations of innovation management, showing that the complexity and integration of the models increases with each subsequent generation in response to change in the environment in which innovation take place. The first and second generations models are characterized as simple linear sequential models and identify innovation as either pushed by technology where marketing and sales is added after production or puled by marker needs where research and development is responding to market need, resulting in modification to the earlier model. They both have lack of feedback, no network interaction and no technological instruments. The third generation is a coupling model that recognizes interaction between different elements and feedback loop between them. A well-known sequential or linear innovation process, the phase gate model from Copper () recognizes that there are feedbacks loops and time variation between steps, and establishes readiness criteria for moving between major phases of innovation development , often are represented by a funnel. The fourth generation model is an interactive approach that views the innovation process as parallel activities across organizational functions. Externally, strong supplier linkage were established as well as close

Having an innovation model provide a conceptual framework for understanding how the change idea could generate the value needed for the long survival of the business. Incremental and less tangible continuous improvements (CI) are nowadays counted among innovation ( Fuglsang &Sorensen, 2011). CI programmers are a specific case for incremental innovation (Bessant & Francis, 1999), with the purpose of increasing efficiency and competitiveness of the workplace through knowledge and commitment of lower level organization personnel. It is a systematic management approach to accomplish performance enhancements through continuous gradual change process, with the aim on increasing the effectiveness or efficiency of an organization to fulfill its