Title : Advancing public health entrepreneurship to foster innovation and impact
Abstract:
The magnitude of challenges facing public health today is daunting, as illustrated by the ambitious United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). For example, despite billions of dollars of investment, obesity, as a major contributor to leading Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, respiratory disease and certain cancers, continues to increase worldwide. In addition, obesity now affects over 20% of U.S. children, a significant increase from prior decades despite expert beliefs in recent years that childhood obesity had perhaps reached a plateau. Worst yet, even in places where childhood obesity has shown a significant decline as a result of aggressive multi-pronged policies and interventions, obesity disparities among minority and disadvantaged populations have actually widened. At the same time, it is also the case that the vast majority of public health research and development is not implemented and scaled to meet the urgency of the challenge. It is estimated that it takes 17 years to scale up 14% of public health innovations, due to a great extent to the limitations presented by the traditional grant-based system for public health research and development. All of this suggests that we need a more agile, dynamic system to foster and scale innovation in public health solutions. In recent years, there have been emerging calls for attention to the incorporation of entrepreneurship methods in public health education, research and practice. Public health entrepreneurship can be defined as a continuous mission- and innovation-driven process to create new ways of tackling public health challenges and to produce lasting social or systems change. In this opinion piece, we propose additional arguments for why the time is now for investment in public health entrepreneurship on part of public, private and academic sectors.
The field of public health is at a momentous juncture with the opportunity to go beyond traditional public health academia and act more strategically across sectors to foster and scale public health innovations. We must do so if we are to meet the challenges presented by the UN SDGs. Increasingly, public health students are demanding action-oriented training, research and practice. As public health educators, we also have a duty to ensure that our graduates are ready for the rapidly changing landscape of technology and are equipped to assume leadership in devising solutions for the world's complex problems of today and tomorrow. The integration of public health and the entrepreneurial sector is critical to building a healthy and sustainable world. The time to invest in public health entrepreneurship is now.
