Case 2: How to manage innovations in healthcare?
Learning goals:
How to manage innovations in healthcare?
1. What are different phases of innovation?
2. Who is involved in innovation management?
a. Which phase, which people?
b. Role of manager?
3. What are the different theories in innovation management?
a. PAT?
4. What are the differences and challenges in innovation management between
biopharma, medical devices and service innovation?
For the more general, start with chapter one of Goffin, then chapter 2 Barlow.
Healthcare learning goals chapter 4 Barlow.
Literature suggestions:
Barlow J (2017). Managing innovation in healthcare. World Scientific, New Jersey, USA.
- Chapter 2: Technology and innovation management: the nuts and bolts (p. 44-50 &
64-65)
o Section: New product development
From the perspective of companies pro-ducing innovative products, the ideal process
is one where uncertainty is gradu-ally reduced by tackling R&D in a series of stages in
which emerging problems are systematically addressed. In this way, the product
moves along a logical pathway, starting with initial scanning of potential user needs,
progressing through technology development and prototyping, refining the product and
finally launching it on the mar-ket.
,Central to this aspect of technology and innovation management is the acquisition of
knowledge obtained through market research, competitor analysis, and technological R&D.
This allows uncertainty to be converted into measur-able risk, an ability to take a calculated
decision about whether or not to proceed with an innovation project. This process has often
been described in terms of a ‘development funnel’, where many ideas or prototypes
are progressively whittled down as uncertainty is reduced and external and internal
resource constraints come into play.
Actively managing the progress of technology projects from inception to development
and commercialisation requires some form of structured decision-making process. In
the ‘stage-gate’ model of Robert Cooper, innovation projects have to meet specific
decision criteria, ‘gates’, as they move through a series of discrete stages. Different
variations on this idea exist, such as the notion of ‘fuzzy’ — less rigid — gates, and the
number of gates varies, but the basic stages are:
- Concept generation — identifying the opportunities for new products and services.
- Project assessment and selection — screening and choosing options which
satisfy certain criteria.
- Development — translating concepts and options into a product and testing the
winning ideas.
- Commercialisation — launching and marketing the new product.
, In practice, new product development is not usually the simple, linear, and unidirectional
process implied by these models.
Nichols proposes an ‘innovation rocket’ in which the end goal is clearly established through
a full understanding of the problem, multiple ideas are generated in a process of
‘combustion’, potentially fruitful mixes are then subject to more detailed R&D and attention
from possible funders and partners, and the best ideas are ‘accelerated’ through the
development process.