Public Health Entrepreneurship

This project explored the feasibility of characterizing, documenting, and disseminating existing public health entrepreneurial activities. Specifically, researchers addressed the question: What are the activities public health entrepreneurs currently pursue to generate new sources of revenue and new service delivery innovations and what organizational adaptations encouraged or resulted from those activities? They: 1) identified existing entrepreneurial public health activities and assess the public health system’s organizational capacity to engage in such initiatives; 2) identified ways that public health practitioners can use entrepreneurship to enhance the capacity to improve population health; 3) shared identified practices across public health practitioners; and 4) stimulated a wide-ranging debate among public health advocates, practitioners, and policymakers about the role of entrepreneurship in how the public health system can best be organized to meet population health challenges. The objective of this project was to provide public health policymakers and practitioners with the first systematic description of innovative strategies to generate new revenues or more efficient and effective practices to improve population health.