Healthcare Innovation Lifecycle and Policy Ecosystem: Insights from India.

Purpose: Healthcare innovations are one of the drivers of healthcare sector growth in India. Innovation policies are challenging because of the uncertainty regarding the outcome of the innovations. Hence, there is a need to understand the interface between policies and healthcare innovations to identify gaps and propose timely recommendations. Acoordingly, this study uses the Indian healthcare startup sector as a case study to analyse the above linkages, gaps and propose recommendations. Methodology: Quantitative data from the startup India portal along with qualitative data from key informant interviews have been analysed to draw insights. Findings: Healthcare startups have made significant contributions to the economy and healthcare sector, but there are gaps and room for improvement especially in the areas of awareness, funding and mentoring. Conclusions: Based on the study findings a conceptual framework has been created for understanding the nature of gaps and their linkages in the healthcare innovation lifecycle.

Food Information Requirements of the Indian Consumers

Because of increase in the complexity of the food supply chain, there is information asymmetry in the food industry. But, in other hand, due to increase in concern over health, sustainability, local production, genetically modified crops and welfare issues, there is increase in concern of consumers regarding food information. Similarly, food information has direct implication to food safety. Although nutritional labelling is common in India, there exist knowledge gap about the actual informational need of the Indian consumers regarding the food they are consuming. This paper using the primary data collected through the structured web questionnaire tries to explore what information are required by the Indian consumers regarding the food and calculates their average willingness to pay for food with higher information. Survey was conducted in the month of March-April, 2019. A total of 514 valid responses were considered in the study. It was found that maximum number of consumers are willing to know more about chemical used at any stage, followed by production and marketing information and dietary health restrictions, respectively. It is found that Indian consumers at an average willing to pay 11.06% more for food with higher level of food information, than ordinary food. This research is valuable for future research on food information and various authorities to make policies regarding food information.