Perceptions of impure innovation: Health professionals’ experiences and management of stigmatization when working as digital innovators

The healthcare sector has increasingly adopted digital innovations. Nonetheless, medical professionals have also resisted a variety of digital innovations. While the range of factors driving such resistance to innovation are well documented, less clear is how such resistance is experienced and managed by professionals attempting to innovate. We conducted a qualitative study of English and German ‘dual-role’ professionals, who worked both as clinical practitioners and digital innovators. Inductively theorizing from our interview data, we explain how individual professionals experience different intensities of stigmatization from colleagues when working with digital innovations. We theorize that the more central a dual-role professional is within an organization and the more their innovation deviates from standard professional duties, the more likely the innovation is to be viewed as impure within a professional group and be the target of stigmatization. We identify a range of professional, social, and personal strategies employed by dual-role innovators to manage their experiences of stigmatization and consider the implications for healthcare innovation.