Accelerating digital health innovation : analyzing opportunities in the healthcare innovation ecosystem

Abstract

There has recently been a dramatic increase in demand for healthcare innovation. In this thesis we present a framework for analyzing a digital health innovation ecosystem in the US. Our framework consists of four key activities: innovation generation, entrepreneurial team formation, early company incubation, and validation of the core innovation. Throughout the paper we analyze the existing literature around innovation in order to motivate the design of the framework. The framework is applied to three key innovation ecosystems in the US; Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York as a way to illustrate how this tool can be used to analyze digital health ecosystems in order to understand what key areas exist for improvement. We end the thesis with a discussion of the various programmatic ideas that might be used to bolster each category as well as a discussion of adapting this type of ecosystem development to the natural capacity of a region.