Health Innovation Manchester as AHSS – the Test of a Hypothesis

The ambitious and wide-ranging paper on Academic Health Science Systems [‘AHSS’] [1] proposed a new model for health innovation and stimulated considerable interest. The paper made three main assumptions about AHSS: i) university-based centres should play linchpin roles in health and social care innovation; ii) medical innovation cannot be achieved without links to industry; iii) innovation occurs at the scientific end of a discovery-care continuum. But the paper had a pregnant coda for the NHS, and GM devolution in particular: the authors explicitly linked their view of the need for the integration of university-based research and health care delivery to population level approaches, suggesting that vertically integrated AHSSs should ultimately transform into integrated care organisations. When Manchester’s experiment in the devolution of health and social care as a place-based approach to health and social care began in 2015, Health Innovation Manchester was created as an AHSS to support innovation in the Partnership. Five years after the start of devolution, this short paper, which is based on a longer study of Health Innovation Manchester’s development [2], provides an overdue reflection on the proposition advanced just over a decade ago [1]

Unveiling the factors influencing transparency and traceability in agri-food supply chains: an interconnected framework

The global food industry is faced with the dilemma of finding a balance between food wastage and food shortage. Approximately one-third of food produced globally goes to waste, while about 800 million people suffer from undernourishment. In these settings, enhancing the transparency of products with high perishability and low shelf life emerges as a pressing, yet unresolved, concern, warranting innovative investigative approaches. In response, we conducted 25 interviews with global agri-food supply chain (AFSCs) experts to ask what impedes the progress of the current technologies, specifically blockchain, to enable transparency and traceability (T&T). Our findings highlight barriers at the individual, firm, and supply chain levels and uncover intricate interrelationships among them. Based on these insights, we introduce an interconnected three-step framework to guide barrier removal in AFSCs. This pragmatic framework outlines three pivotal steps toward achieving T&T in AFSCs: (i) Supplier Development, (ii) Coherent Regulation, and (iii) Incentive Implementation for T&T within AFSC enterprises. As such, managers navigating the complexities of the AFSC landscape will find our results and recommendations particularly relevant. The study is limited by the focus on blockchain, as a key technology to improving T&T, which calls for future research involving other technologies.</p