Innovate4Health: Meeting Global Challenges by Innovating

By Mark Schultz and Stephen Ezell

Many of the world’s biggest challenges are health challenges. The good news is that more than ever, people are meeting these challenges with innovative solutions.

While we still face great difficulties, people all over the world live better than ever before thanks to innovation. New medicines prevent or alleviate disease. New devices diagnose problems, repair bodies, and overcome physical challenges. Still other inventions keep vaccines and medicines fresh and effective or ensure their authenticity. New business models help innovation to happen and ensure that it reaches those who need it.

Many of these innovations are secured by intellectual property rights, which support the ability of innovators to invent and bring solutions to market. Property rights, particularly intellectual property rights, foster the freedom of many hands and many minds to work on challenging problems. They put decisions in the hands of those closest to problems — innovators with knowledge of potential solutions and caregivers and consumers who understand their own needs best. They fund individual careers and industries dedicated to fixing health problems, as well as the businesses that get these solutions to individuals.

With just a bit of reflection, it becomes clear that innovation and the property rights that secure it are key to meeting global health problems. Sometimes, however, the blinding light of necessity makes it hard to see this fact. When people are in need, it is all too easy to grow impatient with the rights of innovators. When that happens, innovators get treated as an obstacle.

We think that better public policy would result from better understanding of how innovation can meet global health challenges. Our organizations, Geneva Network, the University of Akron IP Center (UAIP), and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), have teamed up to tell the exciting story of how innovation is making the world healthier.

For many years now, Innovate4Health has published case studies that describe how IP-driven innovation is tackling some of the world’s toughest health issues. Watch this space for updates. We will be providing links to new stories as well as news about our Innovate4Health report and events.