The Global Forum for Health Research Forum 2009: Innovating for the Health of All took place in Havana, Cuba from 16-20 November. This is the sixth and final in a series of posts from the conference.

It’s now been a month since Forum 2009, so it’s time to wrap up any remaining thoughts from the meeting. My intention with these posts was never to provide a comprehensive view of the conference. If you’re looking for that, or simply additional insights into the meeting, I recommend the following resources:

1. Priya Shetty’s coverage of Forum 2009 for the SciDev.Net blog, five posts
2. TropIKA.net comprehensive coverage of Forum 2009, including daily reports and session reports

On my Cancún-bound flight out of Havana, on the morning of the 20th, the woman sitting next to me asked me for help with her Mexican immigration forms. As I was helping her, I asked what she did. “Terapista”. She asked what I was doing in Cuba. Attending “un congreso de investigaciones de salud pública”. She was a Cuban physical therapist going on a three month medical mission to Tecate in the Mexican state of Baja California, via Cancún, Mexico City, and Tijuana. I spent most of the short flight asking about her experiences on previous missions, all to Mexico, and probing for more details about the Cuban health system. Most memorably, she was quite proud of a unique surgical treatment the Cubans have developed for Parkinson’s disease.

I spoke about the medical assistance Cuba lends to other countries in an earlier post. The photo below of the 20 convertible peso note reinforces this. It touts Operación Milagro (Wikipedia link in Spanish), a joint program between Cuba and Venezuela with official aims similar to Cuba’s other medical mission efforts.

While I was speaking to this terapista on the plane, it occurred to me how important the setting of the conference was given the innovation theme. I don’t think that this was lost on many of the conference participants given external interest in the Cuban system, Cuban participation on panels, and various site visits. Still, there were three circumstances that limited knowledge exchange between the visitors and the Cubans:

1. Language barriers. There wasn’t very much communication between the several hundred Cuban participants and the external participants, especially those from outside Latin America. This was due in no small part to language barriers. Simultaneous translation took place during the larger sessions (UN-style headsets), but the smaller sessions didn’t have any and the informal exchange was visibly limited between the two groups.
2. An apparently flawless system. The Cuban health system may have been the talk of the week, but it was presented without fault. Even though it may be one of the best systems on the planet, it is not immune to needing improvement. Without a realistic understanding of the challenges, it was hard to understand the true effectiveness of the system. (In comparison, Minister of Health Chen Zhu was frank in talking about elements of the Chinese health system that need improvement, for example indicating in his plenary talk that many public clinics in China operate like private clinics.)
3. No U.S. government employees in attendance. There were certainly Americans at Forum 2009, but because of the restrictions associated with the U.S. embargo – it’s a bloqueo the Cubans said, since an embargo implies wrongdoing – there were almost no representatives of U.S. government institutions. I didn’t realize this myself until a colleague from the WHO pointed it out to me. He cited the example of his colleagues from the CDC who were not permitted to attend. Looking through the participant list, I only spotted one, someone from USAID. It’s unfortunate because there was a big opportunity for learning in both directions. In any case there were strong suggestions that we are months away from ending the embargo/bloqueo. Time will tell.

And here’s a post Aman wrote for Global Health Ideas about the Cuban health system two years ago: Lessons from Cuba: Healthcare Infrastructure and Information Systems.

The Global Forum for Health Research Forum 2009: Innovating for the Health of All took place in Havana, Cuba from 16-20 November. This is the fifth in a series of posts from the conference. Only one or two more after this one.

My reason for attending Forum 2009 was to participate in a session title “Innovation for Remote Populations”. This post is a about that session. What follows is taken from my recent report to the Global Forum for Health Research – edited only slightly.

Innovation for Remote Populations

Thurs-19-Nov-2009, 14:00-15:45, Global Café, Palacio de Convenciones, La Habana, Cuba

Coordinators/Facilitators:

• Patricia Mechael, mHealth and Telemedicine Advisor, Millennium Villages Project, Earth Institute, Columbia University, USA & Egypt (organizer & facilitator)
• Tim Hurson, Facilitators Without Borders (facilitator)
• Charles Gardner, Global Forum for Health Research (focal point)

Speakers (alphabetical order):

• Simon Adebola, NEPAD Council Global Health Commission, Geneva
• Najeeb al-Shorbaji, Director, Knowledge Management and Sharing, WHO
• Caren Serra Bavaresco, Student, Epidemiology, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
• Karl Brown, Associate Director, Rockefeller Foundation
• Arul Chib, Assistant Professor, Wee Kim Wee School of Communication, and Assistant Director, Singapore Internet Research Center, Nanyang Technological University
• Dziedzom Komi de Souza, Ph.D. Student and Research Assistant, Parasitology, Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research, Ghana
• Bastiaan Hoefman, co-Founder, Text2Change
• Bernardita Labarca, Project Coordinator, Zoltner Consulting Group, Chile
• Claire O’Neill, Chairperson, Cell-Life-South Africa
• Ravi Ram, Head, Monitoring & Evaluation, African Medical Research and Research Foundation (AMREF), Nairobi Kenya
• Marco Salmen, OHR-GMCP Initiative for HIV/AIDS, Global Micro-Clinic Project, United States
• Jaspal S. Sandhu, Design Researcher, College of Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, USA
• Joel Selanikio, co-Founder and Director, Datadyne.org, USA
• Garance Upham, General Secretary, Direction, Safe Observer International, France

Additional participants – from the audience:

• Elmer Zelaya – Fundación Chica/Nicaragua
• Timothy Dye – SUNY Upstate Medical School/USA
• Jane Kengeya – WHO
• Oyewale Tomori – Redeemer’s University/Nigeria
• Lishandu/Zambia (full name/affiliation not available)
• Vargas/USA (full name/affiliation not available)

Summary:

1. Diverse users and uses: The speakers presented a variety of mHealth/eHealth applications involving a wide variety of users, including both the health workforce and community members, e.g. educating teenagers about HIV/AIDS in South Africa (O’Neill), Internet access in western Kenya to improve uptake of HIV VCT (Salmen), mobile emergency response systems in Aceh (Chib), electronic IMCI in Tanzania (Brown), text-based health education and health service promotion in Uganda (Hoefman), training for health workers as a downloadable game package for phones in Kenya (Ram), telemedicine to improve the skills of health workers at primary levels in Brazil (Bavaresco), delivery of health information to communities in Chile (Labarca), a general set of tools for mobile data collection being used worldwide (Selanikio), and handheld computers to support rural healthcare delivery in Mongolia (Sandhu).
2. mHealth/eHealth is about enabling access: A common theme across diverse applications was that information and communication technologies are being used to enable access to health information and services in places where access is difficult because of remoteness and/or cost.
3. Coordination among the various players: Coordination among donors and projects is necessary to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort and to share what works. This is the role of the mHealth Alliance, supported by Rockefeller Foundation among others (Brown). While there were questions from the program side as to what data donors want (Chib), there was a simultaneous sentiment that donors need “stepwise” guidance (al-Shorbaji).
4. De-emphasizing technology: The mHealth Alliance has recently been discussing development of an “mHealth Toolkit”, to provide a common technical architecture and platform for those planning to implement mHealth programs (Brown). The existence of free technology platforms – in this case DataDyne’s tool – enables programs to focus on developing health content (Labarca). It is important to have a generalizable tool, as DataDyne has done, that can be used by anyone; if individual governments must approve technology “you’ve lost the battle” (Selanikio). Programs must focus on understanding people and applications more than technology; in response to a question from Dye about the use of ethnography in this field, three examples were given: ethnography of teen chat rooms in South Africa (O’Neill), multi-year ethnographic fieldwork as the basis for the program in western Kenya (Salmen), and design ethnography of the information management practices of rural health workers in Mongolia (Sandhu).
5. Defining good evaluation: There are challenges to seeing change in population health outcomes (Chib). It is difficult to measure behavior change (Hoefman) and to evaluate systems that provide health content to people (Labarca). Ethnography should be considered more seriously as a complementary evaluation strategy in mHealth (Sandhu). In evaluation, the metrics should match the intervention – mHealth is another intervention; in addition, we want to see the unintended effects of technology (Ram).
6. New modalities of engaging people: Mobile phones enable fundamentally new ways of engaging with people. As opposed to mass communication that is often used in social marketing, phones allow for interpersonal communication that can be tailored and cost-effective (O’Neill). There are two modalities, moving messages out to people and demand-driven services, where people demand the information that they need (Ram). Salmen lent his support to the importance of demand-driven services and argued that phones will bring more equity. This is all supporting the shift to citizen-centered healthcare (Mechael).
7. Cautions moving forward: In natural disasters, the cellular network is the first to go (Zelaya). An open question: Who owns the data? (al-Shorbaji). Nobody is thinking about “real sustainability” (Adebola). Reliable phone networks are a challenge (Lishandu). We should be careful that we don’t become too dependent on one tool (al-Shorbaji).
8. Need to think more creatively: We should be bolder with approaches; if we are, poor countries “could leapfrog” in health and development terms (Upham). Many of the applications discussed focused on SMS and telephony capabilities; we should think about leveraging more advanced capabilities of mobile phones (Kengeya).
9. Who should design technology? There is an assumption that Africans cannot develop software, but that is not true (Adebola). DataDyne software was already developed by Africans (Selanikio). Africans should develop software, but they shouldn’t redesign what has already been built (Brown).

Conclusions/Recommendations:

1. There is a need for increased knowledge-sharing about mHealth/eHealth within the global health community. This should definitely include policymakers. As Prof. Tomori elegantly stated, while we are thinking about how to reach remote populations, we should think about “hard-to-reach” African leaders.
2. While there was discussion of both eHealth and mHealth, the discussion focused primarily on the latter.
3. There is a need for a continuing dialogue about mHealth. It is unrealistic to expect policy recommendations to come out of this meeting given the state of the field (many open issues) and the limited engagement at the meeting.
4. Major mHealth topics to be discussed at future meetings: definitions; standards, including how to conduct evaluation; and successes and failures from the field.
5. The value of the meeting was threefold: (1) it helped extend the network of those working in mHealth; (2) it provided those outside the field with an understanding of the opportunities and challenges of using mobile phones to improve population health; and (3) it placed a much-needed emphasis on prioritizing people and applications over technology.
6. Mechael suggested reviving the Mobile Metrics and Evaluation Group as a means of maintaining an active mHealth community discussion outside of official meetings.

Other observations:

1. The fishbowl format was successful in eliciting relevant commentary from a large group of speakers as well as from the audience. Time was an issue, though, as several invited speakers only spoke once and several audience members had comments or questions that they were unable to share.
2. One key issue that was not explored – as I stated at the end of the session – was the link between social entrepreneurship and mHealth. This is especially relevant to issues of demand, incentivization, and sustainability.
3. There is a need for an ongoing discussion of these issues at Forum 2010 and beyond – while the conversation will continue in other settings, the Global Forum for Health Research should continue to be involved because of its systems focus, its emphasis on actionable research, and the unique mix of parties (policymakers, donors, implementers) it brings together.

The Global Forum for Health Research Forum 2009: Innovating for the Health of All took place in Havana, Cuba from 16-20 November. I was in Jamaica the week following the conference and completely offline. Now that I’m back in the U.S., I’m planning at least two more posts about Forum 2009. This is the fourth in a series of posts from the conference.

In early 2009, Oxfam released a report Blind Optimism critical of the private sector’s role in healthcare in poor countries. It drew attention to the cause of those who believe that any private involvement in healthcare in these countries is harmful. The arguments, evidence, and position of the report were flawed in numerous ways; sound responses to the report were provided by April Harding and the World Bank:

• Oxfam — This Is Not How to Help the Poor
• World Bank responds to new Oxfam health report

The reasonable conclusion one would come to from working in the field and from studying health systems is that a mix of private and public approaches will be most effective – and that the need for different approaches should be dictated by local context. Ideological extremism – pro-private or pro-public – doesn’t serve anyone, most especially the people who need access to health.

At Forum 2009, there was much stronger representation of the private sector than at the previous meetings. In addition to pharma and biotech, there were several sessions and plenary speakers dedicated to talking social entrepreneurship. One of these speakers was Al Hammond, Senior Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Ashoka. Al spoke during Wednesday’s plenary - Enhancing national environment for innovation: perspectives on low- and middle-income countries (TropIKA.net post about the session) – about Ashoka’s Healthcare for All pilot Punjab, India.

During Q&A Claudio Schuftan of the People’s Health Movement criticized Dr. Hammond and Ashok [sic] for: (1) bringing electronics to people where there is no electricity or way to repair devices, (2) supporting the interests of multinational corporations, and (3) making people dependent on products. Dr. Hammond began his response by saying, “We are aware that there is hostility towards private sector approaches”. He explained that they use market approaches to achieve efficiency and that all the programs he presented are social enterprises started by NGOs. Based on the success of the three pilots so far, the Punjabi government has requested 600 additional units. “Take what you will from that”, he ended.

Dr. Schuftan’s comments are well-aligned with the Blind Optimism ideology. Such comments attempt to polarize policymakers, donors, and implementers. In doing so, they actually keep us from thinking critically about the private sector and social entrepreneurship. Fortunately, this was not the overall tone of the meeting.

At the end of a session examining the role of governmental policy in supporting social entrepreneurship, Julius Mugwagwa of the Open University (UK) asked a question about the “backlash” that might occur if something went very wrong with one of these social entrepreneurial models. This is the type of balanced discussion we really need.

“What I really want to know is: are things getting better or are they getting worse?” – Laurie Anderson

Driving back from the Lesotho border, my eye caught the last brilliant light of the day on a young man carrying wood he had gathered for the fire. I thought back to the teenagers who guard cows all day, of the women waiting, waiting by the side of the road, sitting in the tall grass for hours with small children in the hot sun, waiting for a lift.

And in a world where anything is possible for some of us, is that really true for all of us?

Yes, we can now have video night in Kathmandu, but television only allows you to receive. The real catalyst is the internet, where you become a global citizen – you can learn and participate and create.

You can always just read the news to fall headlong into THINGS THAT ARE GETTING WORSE: “Dubai Debt Woes Raise Fear of Wider Problem”, “Traumatized Russians View Their Dead After Train Bombing”, “Afghans Detail Detention in ‘Black Jail’ at U.S. Base”.

But what the soul needs to live is hope, and dreams.

Innovation Journalism brings us ideas that can change the world by reporting on people, processes and practices of innovators, as well as risks and opportunities. It is a ‘horizontal’ beat, reaching across politics, technology, health et al to report on how innovations arise, and helps shape our future by giving us new language to talk about new ideas.

Crowdsourcing is harnessed brilliantly by Innocentive, the innovation marketplace, where Seekers pose challenges they are having difficulty solving on the internet. A stunning 50% of these questions are successfully solved, and Innocentive has just publicized a study on how successful Solvers tackle problems – which can help us all problem solve better!

But what if you live in rural Uganda, and the roots of your cassavas are rotting? Question Box to the rescue! You can ask a question in your own language that can be answered by someone with access to research, the internet and a question archive informed by local knowledge. If you want to sell those cassavas in Ghana you can text TradeNet (and in Zambia, too) to get the current market prices, so you don’t sell yourself short.

In Mozambique, Village Reach decided to extend services to the last mile.. all people should have access to essential medicines, and they decided to bring in energy sources to preserve the vaccine cold chain. By creating an energy market, now fishermen could refrigerate their catch, and the entire local economy improved.

But how to create social change? We can improve the essentials of life, but to start movements, we must collaborate. Witness the effect of Twitter on the Iranian elections. My cousin’s post on Facebook alerted me to Open Access Week, which encourages the immediate sharing of published research results with everyone, everywhere, for the advancement of science and society. But social change must also come from the grassroots, like City Year, which brings young people together for a year of citizen service, to find their place in the world, and to break down the barriers of race, class and education to change our future. Nelson Mandela saw the potential of these young leaders when he visited Seattle, and asked City Year to come to South Africa to help heal the country. But it shouldn’t be up to one person to spread the word.

Ideas this good shouldn’t be kept to ourselves, they should be shared. And then we can say, “Yes, things ARE getting better.”

Ashoka: Innovators for the Public are hosting Tech 4 Society, a conference exploring technology, invention and social change, in Hyderabad, India, in February 2009. Find out more about the conference here. This blog post is an entry in their competition to find the official blogger to travel to and cover the event.

Nota bene: These are a few highlights from CGI – please do add your inspirations/ideas in the comments!

Clinton Global Initiative – Making things happen through Commitments

Action speaks louder than words. At CGI, you’ve got to commit – and that has an amazing impact.

What will your commitment be?

CGI was the birthplace, in past years, of projects like Matt Damon’s water program (water.org, expanding this year to Haiti), the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women Initiative, and so many more. In the five years of CGI, there have been 1,400 commitments made (participants are required to make commitments to existing projects or commit to creating new projects), valued at $46 billion dollars, and impacting the lives of 200 million people in 150 countries. This year’s meeting will give birth to 30 more of these programs – more by Andrew Mersman over at Passport Magazine/ Change by Doing blog.

Check out CGI Commitments here.

Innovation!

Business Week highlighted innovation as a top priority for the global economy, and President Obama announced a new strategy for innovation: A Strategy for American Innovation: Driving Towards Sustainable Growth and Quality Jobs. Download white paper.

Judith Rodin of the Rockefeller Foundation identified innovation strategies that could be applied to social problems – user-driven innovation, crowd sourcing and collaborative competitions reported here by Alexandra Cheney at Fast Company.  And Innovate Today: 8 Ways Business can End Poverty - superb post by Steve Enders over at tonic.

A few people – including Muhammed Yunus and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala of the World Bank at CGI had an Innovation Wish List. Yunus talked about the edible yogurt pot, and Judith Rodin announced a new initiative to help the poor – the Global Impact Investing Network. This gets my vote for one of the most exciting developments to come out of CGI – read the Economist article.

Investing in Women and Girls

Women make up half of the world’s population, but do 2/3 of the world’s work, produce 50% world’s food, earn 10% world’s income, own 1% of world’s property.

Read the rest of this entry »

This year’s Clinton Global Initiative takes place from 22 – 25 September 2009, where heads of state, government and business leaders, scholars, and NGO directors work together to analyze, discuss, and debate possible solutions to urgent global issues. Each participant is then asked to take action on one or more issues by making a Commitment to Action.

The Economist calls the meeting ‘an important part of the global elite’s calendar’, so join online and watch the live webcast!

As noted in our post on Girls Count: The Girl Effect, one of the major themes this year is Investing in Girls and Women. The four focus areas are Innovation, Human Capital, Infrastructure, and Equitable Futures.

Read the rest of this entry »

As with the last post, I’m copying the description of the session I just attended – Vouchers for Health (Session C3) - from the conference website:

Presenters Discuss: the potential of competitive vouchers in increasing access to priority services for currently underserved populations (Nicaragua); how subsidized, targeted vouchers can achieve the goal of improving health of poor women and children, elements that improve access to high quality health care services, how targeted voucher subsidies help meet the goal of contributing to development of a national social health insurance system that is accessible, affordable and acceptable (Kenya); a nationwide, high transaction distribution project for insecticide treated nets (ITNs) that has given rise to the application of technologies in the use of a relational database as a means to track each voucher transaction, ensuring security and traceability, providing spatial analysis using GPS coordinates, leveraging data from this project to others by providing a central data repository to government, and exploring SMS and mobile phones for automating voucher transactions and gathering patient information (Tanzania); and how poor pregnant women were selected for vouchers jointly by field workers and community support group members, how the institutionalization process for the voucher scheme was implemented, and how the health facilities were strengthened to provide quality maternal health care (Bangladesh).

Why should we care about voucher schemes? Three reasons from where I sit. These schemes provide:

1. An attractive model for extending the reach of services without significant infrastructural investment
2. Incentives for competition to improve the quality of service delivery
3. A mechanism for reducing financial barriers for the poor

Despite this promise, my experience over the last few years – including stumbling through a poster presentation about vouchers in Uganda for Ben at APHA in Boston a couple years back – has taught me that the concept tends to be elusive to “outsiders”. The World Bank’s Private Sector Development Blog has a concise overview of output-based aid for those that aren’t familiar. I won’t try to explain myself, since I’ll probably make some errors.

This session brought together diversity in geography – the talks covered Latin America, Africa, and Asia - and in services – anti-malarial bednets, safe motherhood, family planning, STI prevention and treatment. What was most interesting to me then was not the details of any specific program, but what we might be able to learn from having these different experts in the same room.

So what were the common themes?

1. Vouchers work. Nicaragua saw increases in service utilization, condom utilization, family planning uptake, and KAP. Much of this across different subgroup analyses – age, level of sexual activity, type of residence. The others similarly all saw positive gains in what they were trying to achieve.
2. Institutions matter. In Tanzania, the market is being flooded with free ITNs (possibly LLINs) under a new policy to achieve universal coverage – the fate of the 7000 bednet retailers under the Tanzania National Voucher Scheme (TNVS) is unknown. In Kenya, Nairobi and Kiambu saw better results for the voucher scheme because of existing infrastructure. Nairobi actually had provided more voucher-based services than vouchers sold in Nairobi because of women coming in from outlying areas. Tanzania benefits from a manufacturing base that can produce ITNs and a system that encourages people to pay for a portion of their health care.
3. The system will be gamed. The much higher reimbursement for providers of C-sections than vaginal deliveries has led in some cases to higher rates of C-sections than is necessary. April Harding who was moderating said that multiple schemes have been used/proposed for dealing with this, including capitation (e.g. for 100 women, X% will be reimbursed for C-sections). Fraud is also a problem. While nobody discussed incidences of counterfeiting, the Tanzania program has taken big steps to prevent counterfeiting, including watermarks, microprinting, and a bar code. The bigger issue with fraud is related to ineligible participants obtaining and using vouchers intended for other populations, whether by income or geography. Which leads us to the next point…
4. Equitable distribution is hard. Ineligible participants seem to be a problem with all these programs. In Bangladesh they responded by bypassing governmental decisions about who would get vouchers and relied on CSGs (community support groups) to make the decisions. Another trend is that those who are more poor tend to utilize vouchers less – it is unclear if this due to cost, education, and interaction among the two, or something we’re not thinking about.
5. Understanding redemption is complicated. This was my one question. In both Tanzania and Kenya – the others didn’t present these numbers or I didn’t catch them - the rate of redemption (number of people receiving services under the voucher scheme divided by the total number of vouchers distributed) – was around 80%. After I asked the question and before the panelists responded, my neighbors said that: (1) 80% is pretty good, and (2) the Tanzanians unlike the Kenyans don’t pay for their vouchers until they use them. In Tanzania then, the reasons are grounded speculations: perceived value of the ITNs, access, cost. In Kenya, the majority of the outstanding 20% is due to accounting. The real utilization is expected to be much higher since the cutoff for the evaluation excluded women who had received vouchers, but had not yet delivered (safe motherhood program). Still a minor portion of this is due to women who are unable to deliver at contracted facilities due to a lack of transportation or the timing of the pregnancy.

I just discovered this innovative startup aiming to address a need using a low cost technology, produce a product locally and enable local economic development via a franchising model. I plan on having a much more detailed post in a couple of weeks, in the meantime here is the quick blurb:

Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE) is a 6 employee startup founded in 2008 by Elizabeth Scharpf. SHE Is looking to “create female-run franchises that manufacture and distribute low priced, high quality, and eco-friendly sanitary napkins for domestic and international consumption.” Their goal is to develop “a sanitary pad for women and girls intended to be low-cost and environmentally friendly. The company’s product is focused on women in developing countries, where women miss up to 50 days of school or work per year when they menstruate because existing pads are too expensive.”

I’ll get a lot more details up in a couple of weeks. In the mean time here are some other reproductive health innovations/technologies we have covered before:

• Maternova: Life Changing Technology for Women and Children, link
• Misoprostol (Venture Strategies): how to stop postpartum hemorrage, link
  
• Microbicides: Where are the now? link
  

Cross-posted from Design Research for Global Health.

The California Management Review recently announced the winners of the 2009 Accenture Award: Sara Beckman of Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and Michael Barry, founder of design consultancy Point Forward and Adjunct Professor at Stanford, for their article, Innovation as a Learning Process: Embedding Design Thinking (Fall 2007, Vol. 50, No. 1).

From the award website (which is still on the 2008 winner as I write this): “The Accenture Award is given each year to the author (or authors) of the article published in the preceding volume of the California Management Review that has made the most important contribution to improving the practice of management.”

The paper makes a compelling argument that innovation can be achieved by management and provides a model for cross-functional, cross-disciplinary teams to engage in this process. The relevance to global health as I’ve discussed before (really what this entire blog is about) is that the process can help us improve health systems through innovation.

The challenge in coming years will be how to get organizations and institutions working in global health – foundations, Ministries of Health, NGOs, development programs, health research centers, etc. – treating innovation as a way of working, not simply an input or an output.

The abstract/lead-in isn’t openly available online so I’m copying it here:

Companies throughout the world are seeking competitive advantage by leading through innovation, some — such as Apple, Toyota, Google, and Starbucks — with great success. Many countries – such as Singapore, China, Korea, and India — are investing in education systems that emphasize leading through innovation, some by investing specifically in design schools or programs, and others by embedding innovative thinking throughout the curriculum. Business, engineering, and design schools around the U.S. are expanding their efforts to teach students how to innovate, often through multi-disciplinary classes that give students a full experience of the innovation process. However, what does leading through innovation really mean? What does it mean to be a leader, and what does it mean to engage in innovation?

There is a vast literature on leadership covering a wide range of topics: the characteristics of a good leader, how leadership is best displayed in an organization, leadership and vision, authority, leadership styles, and so on. There is also a growing body of literature on innovation and its various facets, much of it focused by application of the innovation process. Hundreds of publications describe the process of innovation for products — both hardware and software — and a growing number of publications focus on innovation in services. Further, there are dozens of books on innovation in building and workplace design.

Here we examine a generic innovation process, grounded in models of how people learn, that can be applied across these sectors. It can be applied to the design and development of both hardware and software products, to the design of business models and services, to the design of organizations and how they work, and to the design of the buildings and spaces in which work takes place, or within which companies interact with their customers. The model has evolved through two streams of thought: design and learning.

This video, which seems to be unaffiliated to the authors, summarizes the article [correction - I just found out that Shealy did work with the authors on this video - Tues-24-Mar-2009 12:18PM PDT]:

[vimeo vimeo.com/3475327]
 
[Innovation as a Learning Process from Roger H. Shealy on Vimeo]

Here are slides from Beckman and Barry’s presentation at the Inside Innovation 2007 Conference and the Google scholar view of who is citing this work.

[(Dis)claimer: Sara Beckman served on my dissertation committee and Michael Barry provided guidance on my applied research in Mongolia]

Forum 2009
Innovating for the health of all
Innovando para la salud de todos
Havana, Cuba, 16-20 November 2009

Registration here

The letter:

Dear colleague,

Forum 2009: Innovating for the Health of All is this year’s milestone event in research and innovation for health. Organized by the Global Forum for Health Research, it will take place from 16-20 November in Havana, Cuba, at the invitation of the Ministry of Public Health.

What exactly is “innovation”?* How can decision-makers and practitioners work together to foster innovation for health and health equity? What can we learn from innovation policies and initiatives around the world? These questions will be answered in Forum 2009‘s interwoven discussions of social innovation and technological innovation.

This event will bring together some 800 leaders and experts from around the world to share ideas and forge new partnerships. It will include a unique mix of stakeholders from health and science ministries, research agencies and institutions, development agencies, foundations, nongovernmental organizations, civil society, the private sector and media.

As you expand your networks, you will also be able to learn from discussions on social entrepreneurship for health, public-private product development for neglected diseases, eHealth, knowledge-translation platforms, national health innovation systems, donor-country harmonization and coherence, and innovative financing strategies.

With the theme “innovation,” we are challenged to be innovative in the programme itself including new session formats that are more interactive, new ways to network and share information, and new opportunities for inclusion.

So please join us. Registration is now open on www.globalforumhealth.org. We very much look forward to seeing you in Cuba.

Yours sincerely,
Professor Stephen Matlin
Executive Director
Global Forum for Health Research