Health Care In­nov­a­tion and Man­age­ment

Course content

Innovations in health care are made in different context, e.g. by firms as an instrument of competition, by non-profits organizations as instrument for improvement of their services or for reducing their costs, by medical professionals for improved care of their patients and even by patients and their informal caregivers who often innovate as a way to cope with their health condition.

At the same time, the speed in which technology is advancing increases day by day. Artificial intelligence, robotics and big data have made an impact across all industries, but perhaps their greatest impact is in healthcare. As technology evolves in the healthcare field, hospitals and startups have found new ways to improve their offerings and revolutionize the industry.

In all these different contexts innovations are shaped by economic factors affecting the way they are conceived, developed, implemented or accepted by their markets and its users.

This course enables students to understand the fundamental principles and main concepts of managing innovation, including some fundamental management frameworks, as well as the different ways of developing and managing an innovative culture, with a focus in the healthcare context. It will also provide students with a set of tools that will allow them to analyze innovations and to contribute to their managerial decision processes from this economic perspective.

1. The course starts out with an introduction on innovation and management, main concepts and principles.
2. Innovations grow out of opportunities and their combinations. Theories on innovation and innovation modes explain their building blocks and the cognitive and economic factors shaping the transformation of opportunities into inventions and innovations.
3. Innovations in health care come from different sources and are developed in different context, e.g. by firms as an instrument of competition, by non-profits organizations as instrument for improvement of their services or for reducing their costs, by medical professionals for improved care of their patients and by patients and their informal caregivers to help them cope with the limitations imposed by their condition. 
4. Innovations are associated with risks, costs and efforts and will be undertaken only if the innovating agent is adequatel incentivized. For firms this involves the challenge of appropriating the returns on their innovation costs through patenting or other efforts aimed at appropriation. For public institutions, such as hospitals, the innovations are linked to incentives in more complicated ways affecting the way they are conceived, carried out, prioritized and implemented.  
5. Technologies evolve in cyclical patterns, affecting the undertraining and adoption of specific innovations Understanding technology cycles is required for a broad range of decisions in the undertaking and adoption of specific innovations.
6. Companies and other organizations are guided by strategies, and innovations ideally should be strategically consistent in the way they are pursued or adopted. In reality for companies this questions of strategic consistency is less straightforward. In addition, the question presents further complications for a public health care system guided by multiple strategic goals some of which represent ongoing compromises. The assessment and prioritization of innovation from a strategic perspective gives rise to a number of challenges for innovation management.
7. Health care to large extent consists of services. Innovation in services represents a number of challenges different from those found in manufactured products. The strong “people component” of services make them difficult to standardize, scale and apply into effective diffusion, and innovative service organizations have been required to manage their innovations in new ways. Students must understand these service characteristics, and the way they are addressed in innovation strategies.
8. In innovation-intensive sectors, collaboration has become a crucial part of firms’ strategy. Students will need to understand the similarities and differences between collaboration with suppliers, collaboration with competitors, and collaboration between firms in different stages of the value chain. Focus will be put on analyzing how collaboration can promote/hinder innovation.