Facilitating Welfare Technology for Children/Youth

The paper addresses the welfare technology innovation process in the social and health sector in a municipality in Norway. The empirical base highlights how public employees experience that innovation can be facilitated by implementing welfare technology for children/youth. Through change management, opportunities can be created to try out new innovative work practices, ideas, and welfare technologies that can make a difference both for the welfare service and service recipients. Our analysis describes the diffusion of innovation as technology's ability to spread based on the characteristics of innovation. The result shows that the nature of the innovation is important in determining the significance of diffusion. Different assumptions and local variations make adjusting and adapting the innovations necessary. Adjustment can simultaneously make the innovation more general, and thus more suitable for adaptation by adding or removing elements. We show that to successfully adopt innovations developed by others, the conditions, and prerequisites of those who have developed the innovations must be able to be transferred to those who want to adopt them.