Nurse-Led Innovation Isn't Optional, It's the Future

Bonnie Clipper is a nationally recognized innovation strategist, nurse leader, and founder of Innovation Advantage. In this episode, she shares why nurses are the key to meaningful digital transformation — and how healthcare systems can empower them to drive it. From breaking down organizational silos to building cultures of innovation that actually stick, Bonnie’s perspective is sharp, practical, and rooted in real-world change.

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Digital health is here to stay, but that doesn’t mean it’s working. In this episode, Dr. Bonnie Clipper pulls back the curtain on what actually makes innovation succeed or fail in healthcare settings. Drawing from her experience inside and outside of health systems, she challenges the idea that digital health is a standalone concept. “This is just health now,” she says, and that means we need to teach it, design it, and support it differently. 

Dr. Clipper argues that nurses, often sidelined in tech decisions, are essential to solving access and equity challenges. They’re closest to patients. They know the problems. And, as she puts it, they already have the solutions if systems would only listen. She shares how shared governance, protected time, and human-centered design can all be practical levers for surfacing nurse-led ideas and making them stick. 

She also unpacks the biggest roadblocks: tech tools implemented without purpose, poor change management, and a reluctance to empower frontline staff. But Dr. Clipper is hopeful. Across the U.S. and internationally, she’s seeing nurse innovators take the lead, and she’s here to help more of them do it. 

Meet Bonnie Clipper

Bonnie founded Innovation Advantage after more than 20 years as a Chief Nurse Executive when she had the opportunity to commit to innovation during her RWJF Executive Nurse Fellowship and then jumped at the chance to become an ASU/AONL Executive Fellow in Innovative Health Leadership.  Her one-of-a-kind skill-set brings decades of operational experience, bundled with her expertise in nursing innovation and experience in academics.  She is a trailblazer and was the first Vice President of Innovation at the American Nurses Association, where she created an innovation strategy to bring over 4M nurses into the innovation space. She enjoys pushing the limits and relentlessly questions paradigms, which is often on full display in her work as a top healthcare influencer. 

As an internationally recognized nurse futurist, she was a co-author on the seminal work, The Innovation Roadmap: A Nurse Leader’s Guide and was the lead author of the International Best-Selling book, The Nurse’s Guide to Innovation.  She publishes and blogs regularly on technologies impacting nursing.  Dr. Clipper is the sole nurse member of the HIMSS Innovation Board of Advisors and is a start-up coach for MATTER international health tech accelerator.  Her unique understanding of operations, strategy, workforce, and technology make her the perfect bridge-builder to create new workflows and processes to ensure that technology improves care and experiences for everyone.