• Recognize how the economics and governance of different organizational types (firms, public health care organizations) affect their behavior in innovation.
• Ability to apply data analytics to decisions on IHC.
• Skills in analyzing and handling inter-organizational collaboration on innovation, such as e.g. public-private partnerships
• Competence to integrate a number of factors, internal and external to the organization, in decision-related analysis

Healthcare systems across the world are facing increasing challenges, such as ageing populations, ensuring a fair access in developing countries, increasing costs. Innovative thinking is crucial to meet these challenges but it is also equally important to understand how the various actors can manage innovation successfully.

This course enables students to analyze innovations and to contribute to their managerial decision processes from this economic perspective. It also trains students in data analytics and quantitative methods applied to IHC. 

1. The course starts out with an intensive course in data analytics, giving students the tools for examining data and applying them to decision in IHC. These tools will be applied to a number of subsequent topics addressed in the course.
2. Innovations grow out of opportunities and their combinations. Theories on innovation explain their building blocks and the cognitive and economic factors shaping the transformation of opportunities into inventions and innovations
3. Innovations are associated with risks, costs and efforts and will be undertaken only if the innovating agent is adequately 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.   
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.

J. Barlow "Managing Innovation in Healthcare", World Scientific