Author: Viorel Mihăilă
Introduction. Since the concepts of disruptive and sustaining innovations of Christiansen made their way into the models and policies both public and private during the last decade, different new approaches emerged. We do have now reliable benchmarks in analyzing the innovation field, in understanding the global trends or the national ones, financed by NGO’s, IO’s or national agencies. Understanding how innovation might become dominant in certain markets or contexts, it’s important, but the focus seems to have moved towards the outcome of innovations, on their impact on growth and the general wealth of the societies.
Aim of the study. Hal Varian’s concept of “combinatorial innovation” underlined the ascend of a new period of a tremendous burst of innovation. Now we can quickly and conveniently combine different Internetbased components, which are all bits, to create entirely new products and services, available for everyone. The mushrooming of nudging logic based initiatives all over the world, open the room for a new discussion – to what extent the intended target audiences of nudging initiatives will participate in co-generating of the new policies and campaigns, based on the employment of the combinatorial innovation?
Keywords: innovation, social marketing, behavioural economics
JEL Classification: I18, M31, O30
Introduction. Social marketing favoured, since its inception, the field of health promotion – designing programs to help change unhealthy behaviours was one of the primary drivers of this area of practice. On the other hand, the need to have a better-informed citizenry on medical and health-related issues was a constant requirement of the medical professional – better informed and knowledgeable people would more easily “adhere” to the social marketing programs.
Aim of the study. The health literacy imperative is today outpaced by the advance of the Internet-based technologies – Google health search solutions, Microsoft specific products targeting patients or IBM’s Dr Watson suite. Based on this disrupting innovation which involves the realm of the patient-doctor relationship, how shall social marketing programs innovate?
Keywords: social marketing, health economics, behavioral economics, health literacy
JEL Classification: D91, I12, M31