Open Innovation Is No Longer A Rallying Cry In Healthcare — It’s A Movement

It’s become a staple in the software industry. The telecommunications industry has done it. The automobile industry is doing it. And now, the healthcare industry as a whole has adopted the practice of open innovation — and it’s doing it with vigor.

Is open innovation here to stay in healthcare? Measuring its success so far is tricky, but in looking merely at the level of interest, there’s an undeniable trend in the creation of long-term strategies based on open data and ideas from sources outside of individual companies and institutions. The healthcare world is looking beyond temporary partnerships, essentially innovating innovation by building creative, long-term programs to discover compelling new ideas with the potential to improve care and lower costs.

Karim Lakhani, an assistant professor of business at Harvard University who has focused on open-source innovation in his research, said that many of today’s problems in the life sciences lend themselves well to being solved by innovators in other fields. “A lot of healthcare is actually information-based, and biology is also becoming more and more computational science,” he said...