Best practice guidance for creation and management of innovations in health care and information and communications technologies

Abstract

Governments and publics in Europe and around the world have turned to innovation in response to the manifold economic, environmental, and societal challenges we are facing. However, innovations often end up in what is popularly termed as the “valley of death” between upstream creation and downstream product development and implementation. Consequently, the benefits of innovation do not always reach the citizens. In addition, critically informed governance of innovations matter because it allows steering of innovations in response to the values and end points desired by society. With the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed the rise of digital health and new information and communications technologies (ICTs). The pandemic underscored the need for innovation governance between global North and the global South. We report and discuss, in this study, the development of the innXchange innovation wheel to improve innovation creation and management, using a case study of cooperation between Europe and Africa. The innovation wheel offers best practice guidance and framework to build capacity for innovation dimensions such as partnership mobilization, evaluation, and monitoring, not to mention innovation literacy. The framework emphasizes active engagement of all key stakeholders from the very beginning, also referred to as “systematic early dialog.” We propose the incorporation of systematic early dialog as the best practice guidance in global South and global North cooperation for health care and ICT innovation. The framework is a novel instrument to help overcome the current barriers in planetary health innovation management and consequently, bring breakthrough discoveries in ICTs and innovative ideas to the people.