• Understand the fundamental principles and main concepts of managing innovation in a healthcare context, as well as the different ways of developing and managing an innovative culture in a healthcare context;
• Understand the different contexts and sources of innovation in healthcare, e.g. by firms as an instrument of competition, by non-profits organizations for improvement of their services or for reducing their costs, by medical professionals for improved care and even by patients and their informal caregivers.
• Understand the intrapreneurial process and apply intrapreneurial best practices to innovation projects or ventures inside existing organizations
• Recognize how the economics and governance of different organizational types (firms, public health care organizations) affect their behavior in innovation.
• Develop the competences to integrate a number of factors, internal and external to the organization, in decision-related analysis
• Upon successful completion of the course each student should have demonstrated their ability to articulate innovation management issues and to apply the knowledge acquired in a healthcare context.

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 and management innovation.

1. The course starts out with an introduction on innovation, 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.