A review of public entrepreneurship among Dutch healthcare institutions

In this thesis, the Dutch healthcare sector will be evaluated on the level of entrepreneurship involved in the organisations that are part of it. Changes in healthcare policy in the Netherlands are making this an interesting topic to review. With these changes, the government is trying to implement an entrepreneurial spirit in this industry. These policy changes are initialized by the second chamber of the Netherlands and modelled after recommendations of the industry organisation and scholars (Cools, 2008; Poortvliet et al, 2012). In this implementation, one of the main goals is decreasing costs, while increasing innovation, quality and efficiency. The economic circumstances are the reason for the sudden acceleration of the implementation of these rules. With this research, a void in healthcare entrepreneurship is being explored; in deriving the relevant theory, but especially with the insights this paper provides on a national and institutional level. To realize this evaluation, a dataset of the Dutch ministry of health, well-being and sports will be analysed, which contains the year reports of all institutions that are obliged to report to the government. Empirical research on the effects of entrepreneurship is measured in the output; performance, and the input; entrepreneurial characteristics. Performance is in its turn defined in financial and organisational dimensions. Entrepreneurship is measured with respect to the theoretically relevant characteristics in the healthcare industry. Results indicate that several entrepreneurial indicators are of significant influence on performance, but the overall hypothesis; entrepreneurial characteristics have a positive association with organisational and financial performance in the healthcare industry, cannot be supported. Despite this result, strategic recommendations and implications can be drawn from the results of this thesis.