The eighth jury member we propose is Henk Nies.

Henk Nies is a member of the Board of Directors of Vilans, the national knowledge center for long-term care. In addition, he is professor by special appointment of Organization and Policy of Care at the Zonnehuis Chair at the VU University in Amsterdam. Henk is also a member of the Quality Council of the National Health Care Institute.

Can you share your own Brilliant Failure with us?

A Brilliant Failure? A few years ago I made a wonderful workbook for managers about integrated care with many colleagues in an international project. Pieces of theory, models, handy list, locations for additional information and tested in practice. ‘It was written under the motto: anything from this publication may be copied! We even encourage it. We made a kind of loose-leaf folder, where you can easily remove and renew pages.

We didn't realize that you actually need a good publisher with knowledge of the international market to actually reach that market. We didn't have such a publisher, a Dutch one. We thought we would get there with an ISBN number and self-marketing. so no. The book has been translated into Spanish because it was found so useful. But otherwise the success we had hoped for has not been forthcoming. We could now publish the book much faster and cheaper than if we had gone to a publisher. But afterwards I sometimes regretted that we didn't do it differently.