26th International Association for Management of Technology Conference - IAMOT 2017

The impetus of improved access to healthcare services in Sub-Saharan Africa necessitates that various challenges be addressed within healthcare value chains. The most commonly faced challenges have been proven to be major supply chain constraints, a shortage of skilled staff, stock outages, diminished funds, difficulty tracking patient data, cultural biases towards western medicine and a lack of managerial infrastructure (Gray & Vawda, 2016). The result of these challenges not being overcome is limited access to preventative care services. In order to overcome these value chain challenges, more effective approaches to adopt technology and innovation need to be identified. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the interaction between value chain participants and stakeholders is limited when in pursuit of solutions to common issues and challenges. In this paper we introduce innovation platforms as a means through which this chasm can be overcome. Innovation platforms provide a means to bring together different stakeholders such as producers, input suppliers, processors, environmentalists, researchers and public sector players to identify solutions to common problems or to achieve common goals. The members of the innovation platform collectively identify issues to address. Emphasis is placed on developing solutions that are realistic, timely and context appropriate. This is achieved through the inclusion of multiple perspectives across the innovation platform. Successful innovation platforms are commonly developed over a period of time and undergo a series of transitions prior to being fully established and functional. This article adds to the body of knowledge of innovation platforms by delving into its application within the healthcare value chain as well as addressing the role of innovation platforms in tech-transfer. This article presents the findings of a systematic literature review of 52 studies through which the authors explore the core processes and principles required for the development and functioning of successful innovation platforms in the healthcare value chains sector in Sub-Saharan Africa. These findings are synthesised to support the development of an conceptual framework to review and extract key success factors, areas of practice and design guidelines and criteria that will facilitate the integration and management of technology in healthcare value chains. Keywords: innovation platforms; multi-stakeholder platforms; technology management; healthcare value chain; systematic literature review