UNAIDS Office of Innovation: Changing the Landscape of Healthcare Innovation

In September 2020, Pradeep Kakkattil was facing difficult questions about his team’s
strategic direction. In the two years since he had founded the Office of Innovation at
UNAIDS – the United Nations agency for coordinating global action on AIDS – the
team had grown from two people to six and had established over 100 partnerships
globally. With a dual goal to make UNAIDS more innovative and drive innovation in
healthcare worldwide, their flagship initiative, the Health Innovation Exchange
platform, had brought together innovators, investors/donors and government partners
to support innovation in healthcare. Yet Pradeep, as director, felt they had failed to
overhaul UNAIDS internal culture and processes, prompting him to to question the
existing strategy and structure of an innovation unit within such a bureaucratic
organization. UNAIDS was itself undergoing strategic changes aimed at decentralizing
operations and focusing on gender issues. How would his team fit into the restructured
organization, and if it could not, what were their options?

Although many bureaucratic organizations make efforts to establish a culture conducive to
innovation, managers of their innovation units can be confronted by major challenges. Not
only must they drive innovation (often in the face of much resistance) but also learn how to
structure innovation in the organization to achieve scale. Strategic alignment and governance
are essential to survive and succeed in a context of constant evolution.
Students step into the shoes of a director of an Innovation unit who needs to reformulate its
strategy and structure and ultimately determine how the team fits within a particularly
bureaucratic organization, itself undergoing reform. The case prompts discussion of topics
such as incentivizing internal innovation, driving culture change, leading through times of
change, and platform building for innovation.