Success factors of demand-driven open innovation as a policy instrument in the case of the healthcare industry

According to the WHO Global Digital Health Strategy 2020-2024, we should advocate people-centred health systems, promote global collaboration and strengthen the governance of global digital health practices. All this requires a new open innovation approach, which means that stakeholders from regional administrations, hospitals, companies and intermediate organisations openly work together towards commonly identified global and regional digital health goals. Although both practice and theory have proven that the open innovation approach is beneficial for companies and end-users, there is still a need for increased understanding of what leads to the success of digital health related to regional competitiveness through the implementation of policies based on people-centred open innovation. This study is a longitudinal case study in which open innovation ecosystem partners (including challengers (healthcare organisation representatives), solvers (companies), funders (policy organisations) and supporters (intermediate organisations) were monitored and analysed in three countries. The focus of the paper is to explore a digital health open innovation ecosystem over the years. The results show that the created demand-driven open innovation model can be used to strengthen the governance of digital health, and to improve communication density and knowledge transfer between the ecosystem actors. The new model is a useful way to make funding structures clearer and to improve the people centricity of digital health solutions. The findings help policy-makers to use open innovation as a policy instrument supporting hospital and company managers to increase understanding of the opportunities of demand-driven open innovation.