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Imagining value, imagining users: Academic technology transfer for health innovation

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  • Miller, Fiona Alice
  • Sanders, Carrie B.
  • Lehoux, Pascale

Abstract

Governments have invested heavily in the clinical and economic promise of health innovation and express increasing concern with the efficacy and efficiency of the health innovation system. In considering strategies for 'better' health innovation, policy makers and researchers have taken a particular interest in the work of universities and related public research organizations: How do these organizations identify and transfer promising innovations to market, and do these efforts make best use of public sector investments? We conducted an ethnographic study of technology transfer offices (TTOs) in Ontario and British Columbia, Canada, to consider the place of health and health system imperatives in judgments of value in early-stage health innovation. Our analysis suggests that the valuation process is poorly specified as a set of task-specific judgments. Instead, we argue that technology transfer professionals are active participants in the construction of the innovation and assign value by 'imagining' the end product in its 'context of use'. Oriented as they are to the commercialization of health technology, TTOs understand users primarily as market players. The immediate users of TTOs' efforts are commercial partners (i.e., licensees, investors) who are capable of translating current discoveries into future commodities. The ultimate end users - patients, clinicians, health systems - are the future consumers of the products to be sold. Attention to these proximate and more distal users in the valuation process is a complex and constitutive feature of the work of health technology transfer. At the same time, judgements about individual technologies are made in relation to a broader imperative through which TTOs seek to imagine and construct sustainable innovation systems. Judgments of value are rendered sensible in relation to the logic of valuation for systems of innovation that, in turn, configure users of health innovation in systemic ways.

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  • Miller, Fiona Alice & Sanders, Carrie B. & Lehoux, Pascale, 2009. "Imagining value, imagining users: Academic technology transfer for health innovation," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 68(8), pages 1481-1488, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:68:y:2009:i:8:p:1481-1488
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    2. Brantnell, Anders & Baraldi, Enrico, 2020. "Following unique logics despite institutional complexity: An inductive study of academic inventors and institutional logics," European Management Journal, Elsevier, vol. 38(5), pages 684-697.
    3. Miller, Fiona A. & French, Martin, 2016. "Organizing the entrepreneurial hospital: Hybridizing the logics of healthcare and innovation," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 45(8), pages 1534-1544.
    4. Good, Matthew & Knockaert, Mirjam & Soppe, Birthe & Wright, Mike, 2019. "The technology transfer ecosystem in academia. An organizational design perspective," Technovation, Elsevier, vol. 82, pages 35-50.
    5. Carlos Bianchi, 2019. "Diversity, novelty and satisfactoriness in health innovation," Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Springer, vol. 29(3), pages 1059-1081, July.
    6. MacNeil, Maggie & Koch, Melissa & Kuspinar, Ayse & Juzwishin, Don & Lehoux, Pascale & Stolee, Paul, 2019. "Enabling health technology innovation in Canada: Barriers and facilitators in policy and regulatory processes," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 123(2), pages 203-214.
    7. Jhon Wilder Zartha Sossa & Juan Fernando Gaviria Suárez & Natalia María López Suárez & José Luis Solleiro Rebolledo & Gina Lía Orozco Mendoza & Valentina Vélez Suárez, 2022. "Innovation Systems and Sustainability. Development of a Methodology on Innovation Systems for the Measurement of Sustainability Indicators in Regions Based on a Colombian Case Study," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(23), pages 1-24, November.
    8. Nahuis, Roel & Stemerding, Dirk, 2013. "Genomics as a new research regime? Evidence from the Netherlands," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 42(3), pages 676-687.
    9. French, Martin & Miller, Fiona Alice, 2012. "Leveraging the “living laboratory”: On the emergence of the entrepreneurial hospital," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 75(4), pages 717-724.

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