Innovate4Health: The Power of Intellectual Property and Innovation in Solving Global Health Challenges
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.
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 (IP) rights, which support the ability of innovators to invent and bring solutions to market. Property rights, particularly IP rights, foster the freedom of many hands and 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 solving 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 challenges. Sometimes, however, the blinding light of necessity makes it hard to see this fact. When people are in need, it’s 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, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), the University of Akron School of Law, and the Geneva Network have teamed up to tell the exciting story of how innovation is making the world healthier.
Our Innovate4Health project profiles 26 case studies covering five themes:
- Removing practical barriers to accessing treatments;
- Simplifying treatments and diagnostics to make it easier for patients to access and use them;
- Increasing efficacy and removing the detrimental side effects of existing therapies;
- Making personalized medicine accessible to more patients; and
- Reducing the global burden of non-communicable diseases as life expectancy increases.
Collectively the case studies describe how entrepreneurs are creating IP-enabled life-sciences innovations that are helping to tackle some of the world’s toughest health challenges.
