Rethinking medical innovation: organizing R&D, responding to crisis, delivering health services

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of different types of medical innovations. It also increased attention to the policies and practices that drive medical innovation, and which enable rapid development of some essential products while permitting high and rising prices, and persistent unmet needs. Responses to the pandemic thus also triggered a more scientific question: Do we need to rethink more fundamentally how we should understand and investigate medical innovation? This question forms the starting point for the current special issue. This editorial article first reviews three key characteristics of medical innovation: 1) the complex relationship medical innovation has to both demand and need; 2) the critical importance of various forms of scientific knowledge and collaboration; and 3) the centrality of governments and regulations. We next review each individual contribution and highlight how each article touches upon at least two of these key characteristics and prompts reflection on how medical innovation may be rethought. In the final section, the editorial article highlights the unanswered questions that warrant further research from organisation, management, policy, and innovation perspectives. There is still much we need to know about how actors involved in developing and implementing medical innovation can and should respond to crises in general, including what innovation policies and regulations are needed to strengthen innovation capacity, as well as the deep and complex links between medical innovation and the delivery of care.