title: Convergent innovation for sustainable economic growth and affordable universal health care: innovating the way we innovate.
abstract: This paper introduces convergent innovation (CI) as a form of meta-innovation-an innovation in the way we innovate. CI integrates human and economic development outcomes, through behavioral and ecosystem transformation at scale, for sustainable prosperity and affordable universal health care within a whole-of-society paradigm. To this end, CI combines technological and social innovation (including organizational, social process, financial, and institutional), with a special focus on the most underserved populations. CI takes a modular approach that convenes around roadmaps for real world change-a portfolio of loosely coupled complementary partners from the business community, civil society, and the public sector. Roadmaps serve as collaborative platforms for focused, achievable, and time-bound projects to provide scalable, sustainable, and resilient solutions to complex challenges, with benefits both to participating partners and to society. In this paper, we first briefly review the literature on technological innovation that sets the foundations of CI and motivates its feasibility. We then describe CI, its building blocks, and enabling conditions for deployment and scaling up, illustrating its operational forms through examples of existing CI-sensitive innovation.
authors.affiliation: Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada.|McGill Centre for the Convergence of Health and Economics (MCCHE), McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada.
authors.forename: Laurette
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Dubé
authors.affiliation: McGill Centre for the Convergence of Health and Economics (MCCHE), McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada.|International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Washington, DC.
authors.forename: Srivardhini
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Jha
authors.affiliation: Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada.|McGill Centre for the Convergence of Health and Economics (MCCHE), McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada.
authors.forename: Aida
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Faber
authors.affiliation: Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada.
authors.forename: Jeroen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Struben
authors.affiliation: William Davidson Institute and Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
authors.forename: Ted
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: London
authors.affiliation: The INCLEN Trust International, New Delhi, India.
authors.forename: Archisman
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Mohapatra
authors.affiliation: McGill Centre for the Convergence of Health and Economics (MCCHE), McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada.|Public Policy and Global Health Diplomacy, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada.|London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Nick
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Drager
authors.affiliation: McGill Centre for the Convergence of Health and Economics (MCCHE), McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada.
authors.forename: Chris
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Lannon
authors.affiliation: International Food Policy and Research Institute (IFPRI), New Delhi, India.
authors.forename: P K
authors.initials: PK
authors.lastname: Joshi
authors.affiliation: International Food Policy and Research Institute (IFPRI), New Delhi, India.|Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health, Washington, D.C.
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: McDermott
mesh_terms: D000383:Agriculture / Q000379:methods*; D003132:Commerce; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D003661:Decision Support Techniques; D003695:Delivery of Health Care / Q000639:trends*; D057217:Economic Development; D004470:Economics, Medical; D017048:Health Care Costs; D018166:Health Care Reform; D018803:Models, Economic; D017146:Models, Organizational; D009936:Organizational Innovation; D017150:Public Sector
keywords: agriculture; business; collaborative interdependence; convergent innovation; health; industrialization; innovation; vulnerability