Global Heath Case Studies

Overview

Year after year at Stanford, we observed dozens of bright, motivated student teams developing creative solutions in project-based courses to address the health-related needs of underserved patient populations in low-resource setting. However, few of these inventions ever reached their intended audience or achieved meaningful scale. Something was going wrong, and we wanted to understand what.

As part of Stanford’s Global Health Consortium for Innovation, Design, Evaluation, and Action (C-IDEA), funded by NIH grant 1 RC4 TW008781-01, Stanford Biodesign and a team of others initiated a project based at the Graduate School of Business to investigate where innovators developing global health products and services are most likely to stumble on their way to market and what resources are available to help them anticipate and overcome common barriers.

Over the course of approximately 18 months, we interviewed nearly 60 innovators representing more than 25 organizations/projects, operating in countries spanning five continents. The results was 48 mini-case studies that we call the Global Health Innovation Insight Series. 

We also looked across the collection and extracted what we consider to be the key take-aways from the project, which are now available in the Global Health Innovation Guidebook. This “executive summary,” includes anecdotes and examples from the cases, as well as lessons and themes that cut across the stories.

We hope the output from this project provides a starting place for additional research, gives global health innovators much-needed and well-deserved tools, and helps more good ideas reach the underserved patients and providers they’re intended to help.