This module will introduce you to innovation. What is innovation? Why do we need innovation? And how to innovate? A common definition is that innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or an improvement in offering goods or services. The term innovation has made its way into health care from other fields such as business, design, technology and marketing. According to the World Health Organization, the goal of health innovation should be to improve our ability to meet public and personal health care needs and demands by optimizing the performance of the health care system. Innovations in health care should aim for creating scalable solutions and improvements in health policies, systems, products, technologies, service and delivery methods. All of this in order to improve the quality of research and outreach, of education, of preventive measures, diagnosis, treatment, delivery and access to health care, both locally, nationally and globally. Two main principles structure the way of working with innovation in the approaches that we're going to introduce in this module. Innovation is human-centered and most often it's characterized by iterative and experimental processes. As for the first one, for innovation to succeed, we must put humans first and understand the pains, desires, needs, frustrations and experience of those people involved and affected by the problem we aim to solve. If new solutions are to live, they need to match the actual needs and be adaptable into people's lives. Challenges and problems in the health care sector are often very complex and have different roots in different causes and perceptions. You must seek to understand these from the different perspectives of all the involved target groups, the relatives, the health professionals, the decision makers and other stakeholders of various levels. Second, innovation is an iterative and experimental process of discovery, development and delivery. Iterative processes are repeated cycles of trial and error where you continuously built, test and iterate on your assumptions based on continuous feedback. This means that you start building your assumptions and prototypes in order to measure how they work, in order to learn and gain deeper insights so that you can rebuilt, make changes and iterate along the way and in this way start over the cycle. Ideally, you involve your target group and stakeholders in every step of the process. So how do we innovate? Here, I will introduce you to three commonly used approaches in entrepreneurship and impact innovation. The first one, design thinking, includes a set of strategic and practical processes by which design concepts are developed. The second, lean startup, is more focused on business and product development. And finally, the theory of change explains the process of change by outlining causal linkage in an initiative. We'll go more in detail with the three approaches one by one. First, the design thinking process model. It's an approach used to address complex problems focusing on the human needs. Design thinking is inspired by the design practices for human behavior and needs. It's experimental and it looks at problems holistically. Also, you explore many different possible solutions before deciding on one final solution. Curiosity and insight into human needs, behavior and context are essential means to qualify the understanding of the problem and ensure you develop new and meaningful, sustainable solutions. The design thinking model goes through five different phases. You need to go back and forth between them in your development. You shift between divergent thinking, meaning opening up for new ideas and perspectives and convergent thinking, meaning singling out and narrowing down specific ideas in order to explore their relevance and potentials for further development. In the first phase, the 'empathize' phase, your aim should be to gain an empathetic understanding of the problem you're trying to solve, typically through user research. Put your own ideas aside and focus on listening, observing and understanding. Explore the problem from many different perspectives and determine whether you're actually focusing on the right problem. Some of the specific methods you can apply in this phase, include qualitative interviewing, observations, user journeys, empathy mapping or other methods applied in fieldwork. In the 'define' phase, which is the next phase, you make sense of all the insights you have gathered. You analyze your observations and you synthesize them into defining the core problems that you have identified. This is where you make your problem statement. And with a clear problem statement, you're ready to move on to the 'ideation' phase. You must think outside of the box and look for new ways to solve the problem. Be creative. Try to come up with as many ideas as you can. Many, initial ideas could be 50, maybe even 100 ideas. You can use brainstorming with the simple question 'how might we'? This will open up for many different ways to solve a challenge. When you have a storm of ideas, cluster them, organize them and select which ones to pursue in the next stages. The final two steps of the design thinking is 'prototyping' and 'testing'. They go hand in hand, helping you mature and gain important feedback on your idea and the underlying assumptions. In the 'prototyping' stage, you put your idea into a visual form, no matter if it's an idea for a product or a service or a more abstract concept. Visualize it with storyboards, physical drawings, prototypes or similar. Then the 'test' phase involves engagement and interaction, interaction with humans, so that you can immediately see and assess the solutions with real-world feasibility. Look for vulnerabilities in your solution. You should consider how to use the 'testing' phase to get real actual feedback on how people experience your prototypes instead of just asking for confirmations. Make sure you test your solutions with honest conversations, observations and experiments where people interact with your prototypes and use them the way you have intended. The lean startup is another approach to use in an innovation process. The model is used for developing new solutions and enterprises in order to reduce risks and minimize the spending of resources by making sure that the solution meets an actual market need and has a market of customers or users. In the lean startup, you work with a series of untested assumptions, basically good guesses on how and why your solution would work. The lean startup favors experimentation and feedback from your users in order to continuously validate and change these assumptions. You can start by mapping all your assumptions in the lean canvas to get an overview of how you can create value and for whom. It also shows how elements of your project relate to each other. You start by filling out the problem and your customers or end users. What is your target users main problem? Put yourself in their shoes and capture their key pains and frustrations. Then you formulate how you provide a unique value proposition. This is a statement that reflects the promise of value that your solution delivers. It explains how you solve your user's problem. Then you describe your solution. How does it work? What does it look like? And if possible, visualize it. Describe what channels you need to reach your users with. For example, how to communicate with them and how to make them aware of your solution. Also, consider which revenue streams you have available and which resources does your solution require to be doable. Finally, write down the key metrics of success, meaning how you will measure the impact of your solution. When you have everything lined out, it's time to test all the assumptions. Go out, observe, talk and interact with people. This could be users, purchasers or partners. And you do that to get feedback on all elements of your project. Use their input to revisit and improve all of your assumptions. The final model I'll show you is the theory of change. 'Theory of change' is an approach to identify the necessary steps you need in order to achieve a particular impact goal. The main rationale is about understanding the connections between intended outcomes and why one outcome is needed in order to achieve another. Theory of change is a causal framework revealing the often complex web of activities required to bring about change. Like the other two models I have shown you, the framework is based on mapping assumptions in order to test them. In the theory of change, the focus is on delivering the actions that will best produce the outcome in the model. It helps you identify the potential impacts and the risk of your plan and connect your work to an overall goal. Your intended impact is the starting point for your theory of change. You begin by defining your problem and a clear impact statement about the broad and long term change that you want to see happen. Also, identify the assumptions behind the intended impact. In the theory of change, you move your way backwards and you define the preconditions and requirements necessary to achieve that goal, and you explain why. Work your way backwards from your intended impact to the changes that need to happen in order to achieve it. And then you fill out the other boxes in the canvas. What are the wider benefits of your impact? What are the measurable effects of your work? What steps are required in order to bring that change to life? What is the entry point to your key audience and who is your key audience? Meaning, who are the people that are most affected by the issue that you have identified? When you have an overview of what the preconditions are to create your intended change, you can start to be specific. Now it's time to define specific actions necessary to make all the preconditions reality. Try to be as concrete as possible because it will help you come up with more efficient actions. In other words, practical steps that you can take in order to make your change happen. As you fill out each of the boxes in the worksheet, it's critical to reflect on the key assumptions that underpin the different steps and use your actions to validate them. Using the steps from the theory of change can be a helpful tool in the beginning of a project to support your strategic planning or to assess or evaluate an existing project. Now, we've been through three different models for how to innovate. No matter which one you use, innovation is fundamentally about creating change by bringing new ideas to life, so that existing practices change or are replaced with a new way that create better value. However, the change is not a goal in itself. Innovation should take ethical and social consequences into consideration. Innovation must be acceptable, it must be desirable, and it must be sustainable. You should always consider whether a new practice creates better value than already existing ones. To do so, you must evaluate the various consequences that the innovation has for all parties involved, be it intentional or unintentional consequences. For example, how patients' lives or health professionals' daily work are affected both on the short-term and on the long-term. Responsible innovation is about taking due consideration to all of these consequences. This highlights the principle mentioned about putting humans first and ensuring that innovation processes are co-creative and inclusive in order to capture all concerns or downsides after the innovation as early as possible. In this video, you have been introduced to an overall definition of innovation in health and to three different and complementary approaches on how to innovate: the design thinking, the lean startup and the theory of change. I hope that these can be an inspiration to you and help you come up with and mature new and solid ideas to how to improve health and wellbeing.
