LEAD 6143 Module 4 Operational Innovation Proposal Example

The Partner Drive: An Operational Innovation Combining Same-Day Online Screening, a Split Screener Role and Community-Hosted Neighborhood Drives at a Regional Blood Center

Student Name

American College of Education

LEAD6143: Strategic Operations Planning and Innovation

Module 4 Assignment

Instructor Name

November 2, 2026

Introduction

Three modules of this course have built a case: the blood center's mission promises blood for every patient but its operations favor large suburban drives; donors, staff and families of sickle cell patients all need closer, shorter and more frequent neighborhood drives; and a time study found that the screener role constrains every drive while late hemoglobin deferrals waste donors' time. This paper proposes an operational innovation that responds to all three, judges its likely adoption against research on innovation in organizations and plans a pilot.

The Innovation

The Partner Drive combines three changes. First, same-day online screening: donors with an appointment complete the donor questionnaire on their phone or a computer on the day of donation, before arriving, so that screeners review answers rather than wait while donors read questions. Second, a split screener role: at each drive one staff member reviews questionnaires and handles follow-up questions while another performs mini-physicals, with hemoglobin checked as early in the sequence as procedures permit. Third, community-hosted neighborhood drives: a church, community center or sorority chapter hosts a recurring monthly drive, recruits donors through its own networks, books appointments by phone for donors who do not use email and receives regular reports on how its donors' blood was used, including for patients with sickle cell disease. None of the three is new to blood collection elsewhere; the innovation lies in combining them and in aiming them at the communities the mission underserves.

Expected Effects

Based on the Module 3 time study, same-day online screening should cut health history time for returning donors from about 14 minutes to 6, and the split screener role should cut the bed wait by about half, bringing the median visit from 62 minutes to roughly 45, the length donors said was acceptable. Under the queueing relationship applied in Module 3 (Little, 1961), the same arrival rate would mean about a quarter fewer donors on site at once, easing crowded host spaces. Freed screener time would allow a standard crew to run a neighborhood drive in a morning and a second in the afternoon. The point of the efficiency gains is not a higher units-per-hour figure but staff time redeployed to the drives the mission needs.

Will It Be Adopted?

Greenhalgh et al. (2004) combed a large literature on how new practices spread through health services and found that adopters favor innovations that clearly beat current practice, fit how they already work and what they value, are easy to grasp, can be piloted in one place first and show results that others can observe. Judged against these, the Partner Drive scores well on relative advantage for donors and staff, on trialability, since it can be piloted at a few sites, and on observability, since visit times and drive counts are easy to see. Its weakest point is compatibility: it conflicts with the scorecard that rewards units per staff hour, and neighborhood drives will still produce fewer units per drive than corporate ones. Complexity is moderate, because the split screener role changes staff routines and the online questionnaire requires a software update.

Organizational Conditions

Damanpour (1991), meta-analyzing studies of organizational innovation, found that adoption was positively associated with factors such as specialization, professionalism, managerial attitudes favoring change, technical knowledge resources, slack resources and internal and external communication, and negatively associated with centralization. The center has strengths here: a professional workforce, a quality department with technical expertise and strong external relationships with hospitals. Its weaknesses are centralization, since drive scheduling decisions sit with one manager, and slack, since crews are fully booked. The pilot plan below addresses both by giving one regional team authority over its own schedule and by funding a temporary extra screener for the pilot period.

Involving the People Who Will Run It

Collections staff will do most of the work of the Partner Drive, and the focus groups in Module 2 showed that they already favor community drives when the scorecard does not punish them. The pilot will therefore be designed with them rather than handed to them. Two screeners and a drive supervisor from the west region will join the quality department in writing the split screener workflow and testing it at a practice drive before the pilot begins. Staff will also choose which of two scheduling patterns the regional team uses. Greenhalgh et al. (2004) emphasized that adopters are not passive recipients and that innovations are often adapted, or reinvented, by those who use them; the pilot should expect and welcome that, while holding the safety procedures fixed.

Pilot Plan

The pilot will run for three months in the center's west region. Two community partners from the Module 1 conversations, a church and a community health center, will host monthly drives, and two suburban drives in the same region will test the online screening and split screener role. Measures will include median visit time, donors leaving before donation, units per drive, first-time donors, donors who identify as Black and the number of matched units the region supplies locally for the children's hospital. A temporary screener position will cost about $14,000 for three months, funded from the center's operational reserve with the board's approval.

Decision Rules

To avoid judging the pilot by preference, the senior team will agree in advance on what results would justify expansion: a median visit time at or below 50 minutes at pilot sites, at least 120 first-time donors at the two partner drives over three months and no increase in donor adverse reactions or quality deviations. If the efficiency targets are met but the partner drives draw few new donors, the screening changes will be expanded and the partner model redesigned with the hosts. If safety measures worsen, the pilot will stop immediately.

What Expansion Would Cost

If the pilot succeeds, extending the Partner Drive to all four regions would require four permanent screener positions, about $230,000 a year with benefits, plus a one-time software cost for the online questionnaire that the vendor has quoted at $40,000. Against that, the center spent about $310,000 last year importing antigen-matched units from other centers, and a modest reduction in imports, combined with fewer donors walking away from long waits, would cover much of the cost. The case for expansion will be made with the pilot's actual figures, not these estimates.

Risks

Three risks need managing. Online screening could exclude donors without internet access, which is why phone booking and on-site questionnaires remain available. Splitting the screener role may initially slow drives while staff learn it. And community partners may lose interest if they see no results, which is why the plan includes regular reports to each host on donations and their use. A fourth risk is internal: managers whose bonuses still depend on units per staff hour may quietly favor the suburban pilot sites, which is one more reason the scorecard must change.

Conclusion

The Partner Drive turns the process findings into a concrete change: shorter visits, a balanced screener line and recurring neighborhood drives hosted by the communities the mission most needs. Research on innovation adoption suggests it is trialable and visible but conflicts with the current scorecard, which the strategic plan in Module 5 must change for the innovation to last beyond the pilot.

References

Damanpour, F. (1991). Organizational innovation: A meta-analysis of effects of determinants and moderators. Academy of Management Journal, 34(3), 555-590. https://doi.org/10.2307/256406

Greenhalgh, T., Robert, G., Macfarlane, F., Bate, P., & Kyriakidou, O. (2004). Diffusion of innovations in service organizations: Systematic review and recommendations. The Milbank Quarterly, 82(4), 581-629. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0887-378X.2004.00325.x

Little, J. D. C. (1961). A proof for the queuing formula: L = λW. Operations Research, 9(3), 383-387. https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.9.3.383