Project Directors: Dr. Krishna Udayakumar & Laura Sampath
Authors: Caitlin Murphy, Sarah Dunn Phillips, Cara Barnes, and Mark Marino
Summary
In the world of global health innovation, the rapidly increasing presence of accelerator programs—accelerators, incubators, and catalytic funding programs—drives the need for frameworks to help make sense of large portfolios of innovations. The innovation assessment framework, developed by the Duke Global Health Innovation Center and VentureWell , was created to inform the design of an accelerator program for 45 innovator teams with promising solutions to critical challenges in the field of maternal and newborn health. The framework can be easily integrated into an accelerator program to help analyze and assess the support needs of an early-stage global health innovation portfolio and can have wide-reaching implications for program design. The applicability of the tool also extends beyond accelerator programs, and can be leveraged by funders, investors, and innovators to support both innovator-specific and cohort-level analysis of an innovation portfolio. In this publication we provide an in-depth discussion of the innovation assessment framework.