Handbook on Health and Innovation

This comprehensive Handbook explores the relationship between health and innovation, highlighting how progress in health depends on the systems, people, and values that guide how innovations are created and used. Bringing together history, global experiences, and today’s post-pandemic realities, the book demonstrates that better health comes from smart choices: investing in strong local services, designing fair rules for new technologies, supporting communities to participate, and ensuring that innovations reduce - not widen - inequalities.

Contributing authors advocate for an equity by design approach, embedding fairness and place sensitivity delivery as central to future policy when dealing with contemporary challenges. They integrate interdisciplinary approaches from public health, innovation studies, political economy, and socio-technical analysis to show how communities can actively steer the health-innovation relationship. With case studies from multiple regions, technologies, and governance contexts, the Handbook provides transferable lessons for health systems at different stages of development.

The Handbook on Health and Innovation is a valuable resource for students and scholars of science and technology studies, innovation, and healthcare due to its unique governing framework. The operational tools for practitioners, including templates for implementation capability, valuation beyond cost effectiveness and region level strategies for capability building and learning systems, make this a valuable read for healthcare policy makers and practitioners.