My name is Dr. Matthew Harris, and it is my great pleasure to welcome you to the Global Health Innovation specialization. I'm a clinical Senior Lecturer in Public Health, and I research health care innovation, and its spread between low and high income countries. Together with my colleagues, Natasha and Mark and many other innovation experts here at Imperial College London in this specialization, we'll examine health care innovation in all its complexity, and equip you with some of the tools to do it. Innovation in healthcare is absolutely critical to solving the new and emerging healthcare problems we face, as in aging, growing population. Without innovation, we'll fail to cope with increasing demands, and we'll fail to meet growing expectations, and we'll fail to ensure high quality care for all. Instead, in this specialization, you will be focusing on the challenge of innovation in the context of health care. You'll explore this exciting topic in depth, and emerge well-equipped to address the complexity of innovative better, more effectively. This way, you'll be able to identify and maybe even develop innovations that address those health care challenges. So why is that important? Well, innovation doesn't just happen on its own, many people have good, even great ideas to solve health care problems, but very few are able to translate those ideas into practice, and even fewer are able to scale that practice to impact on society. That is what innovation is all about. Innovation is all about change to improve practice. Can you think of some of the challenges involved in innovation there? Because in this specialization, you'll be looking at many of them in turn. With you, we'll look at different types of innovation, disruptive, frugal, and reverse. In particular, innovations from low and middle-income countries that have great potential to transform health care. You'll look at the design process, taking an idea and finding the order amongst creative chaos, and developing that into a prototype to meet a need. You will look at business development around the invention, and protecting intellectual property, securing the right type of resources, and building an enterprise. You'll look at entrepreneurship and how to best picture an idea to your audience. You'll look at the challenge of diffusion and scaling innovations. What are the hooks and leavers, and what success looks like? You'll explore why health care as a context is particularly challenging to innovative. Along the way, we'll provide tips and resources to identify funding for innovation, as well as guidance on what works and what sometimes doesn't work when it comes to healthcare innovation. Overall, this specialization will help you to identify and critique innovations to know everything is innovative. Despite what the innovator might tell you, many technologies are simply incremental changes on previous things. Sometimes, the solution in one context is completely naive, but in another context it's already obsolete. Other times, something might not seem a tool innovative and yes it is, because of its impact direct or otherwise on health care and health outcomes. Finally, sometimes innovation might arise from the most unexpected places, and you'll learn about not letting that affect how we judge the effectiveness of the innovation. We're really glad to have you join us on this journey into health care innovation. Let's get started.
