Innovation, defined as the ability to generate and implementing new knowledge’s, becomes a basic challenge for the economy, companies, public organizations, and the health sector. It depends on leadership aimed at the creativity and the implementation of value-added changes for society. In the health sector prevails the intra-entrepreneurship approach to innovation, where professionals are protagonists; the agencies for technology assessment might play a fundamental role in the modulation of technology diffusion, to gain effectiveness and efficiency.
Innovation in organizations
Conceptually, innovation is the activity aimed at the generation and implementation of new knowledge. We are referring to the creative process and exploitation of new ideas based on individual and organizational knowledge.
Innovation in the health sector
The health sector has led to important changes in all areas (macro and micro), which have been accelerating throughout the twentieth century. Some have been “disruptive” (they represent a fundamental change in organizational and operational models), and many others have been incremental and progressive.
Thus, for example, in the “macro” aspects, the emergence of public assurance of disease risks, which is generalized in Europe after the Second World War, was a fundamental milestone to generalize the benefits of medical science and technology to very broad layers of the population, but it was also a pre-condition for the very development and modernization of health care. Its disruptive effect led to making the liberal medicine model obsolete and introducing the public insurance agent as a center for regulation and system transactions.
Essential Roles of Inventions in Health
Under this hypothesis, the concept of health is also conditioned by seductive messages confirming that the invention of health is achieved through the use of drugs. In a capitalist society, citizens have become accustomed to buying everything they want. Thus, stimulated by the pharmaceutical industry, men and women have attended the birth of the so-called “lifestyle drugs” (lifestyle drugs), intended to treat risks as if they were diseases. The proliferation of these drugs, together with the new techniques of communication and marketing, essential to publicize the new pharmacological, have provided the breeding ground necessary for the creation of strategies called (disease mongering ).
This editorial reflects on the marketing and communication strategies of the pharmaceutical industry, which are aimed at the consumer community as well as the health sector, emerging as a problem for public health, turning healthy people into patients, wasting valuable resources and causing adverse effects.
Invention strategies for diseases and patients
Pharmaceutical marketing is one of the most expensive items of the companies that own the drugs. The purpose is to develop strategies of persuasion that operate in a double direction. On the one hand, they simplify the messages, making available information that requires more sophisticated knowledge, universalizing knowledge. On the other hand, they become an important source of income for the media, including scientific journals, which can condition the information by being accepted as judges and part. This indirect control exercised over the environment makes them one of the most important filters of medical knowledge.