Table 3 Social innovation hub values and application

Inclusion

The launch of the pilot hub South Africa coincided with the first Inclusive Healthcare Innovation Summit (organised by the hub as its first activity). The status quo for health-related meetings in South Africa was attendance by health professionals and experts. This Summit was opened up to any individual or organisation with an interest in innovation in health delivery. It attracted 284 delegates from across 8-sectors. Delegates included among others: policy makers, researchers, frontline health workers, entrepreneurs, non-governmental organisation workers, and students. A delegate comment: “you really didn’t rent the usual crowd” [28]

Asset-based

All country hubs engaged in recognising and promoting existing social innovations in their settings in order to illustrate that despite health system challenges faced, there are also an abundance of unknown, yet impactful, solutions at grassroots level.

To do so, crowdsourcing contests were done to identify positive examples of social innovations and these innovations were awarded and promoted. In the case of Latin America hub, their social innovators were recognised by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and in the Malawi hub, the innovators were recognised by the Malawi Ministry of Health. Research was done on these cases to build the evidence base on the application of social innovation in health systems.

Co-creation

In 2018, all country hubs commenced a hub-strategy development process. This was conducted thoughtfully and purposefully, first through stakeholder mapping and then engaging all the relevant stakeholders in informing the strategy. This included stakeholders from the Ministry of Health but also grassroots social innovators. In the Philippines, the hub created a strong partnership with the national health research development council which lead to the co-creation of a national social innovation identification process and annual award.

Hope

Language and design played an important role in fostering a renewed sense of future possibility, despite resource constraints. A communication campaign was launched in lead up to the 2015 the global convening on social innovation in health. The campaign used the slogan “WHAT IF…” eg. WHAT IF healthcare delivery in low-income countries could be re-imagined?” All communication products were designed according to a specific brand that was created. Core to the brand is displaying images showing strength, courage and vibrancy of people living in low and middle-income countries. Relational engagement in the form of cross-cutting nature of in-person meetings and workshops, facilitation techniques to generate discussion between individuals from opposite spectrums further supported fostering hope [29].