Innovating for women's, children's, and adolescents' health.

T he progress report on the UN secretary general’s Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health, Saving Lives, Protecting Futures, notes that “innovation is essential to achieving the ultimate goal of ending preventable deaths among women and children and ensuring they thrive.”1 The report advocates for integrated innovation, which combines science and technology and social, business, and financial innovation to enable sustainability and the scaling up of interventions.2 Innovation is required in all aspects of the Every Woman Every Child initiative (www. everywomaneverychild.org), including health systems, social determinants of health, human rights, leadership, finance, and accountability, to help to achieve the United Nations’ sustainable development goals. Strategically, innovation forges non-traditional partnerships among the public and private sectors, attracts new sources of funding through investment opportunities for the private sector and governments, and stimulates creative ways for countries to use innovation to accelerate attainment of their health goals. Innovation complements programmes that achieve results in the near term but that may not be sustainable without ongoing support from donors. Alongside Every Woman Every Child in 2010 the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, launched an associated Innovation Working Group to advocate for, identify, and support innovations to accelerate progress on the health targets in the millennium development goals. Meanwhile, global partners of the secretary general’s strategy were developing a pipeline of innovations in women’s, children’s, and adolescents’ health. Research conducted for Saving Lives, Protecting Futures showed that more than 1000 innovations totalling over $255m (£165m; €235m) had been supported in the research and development pipeline. We are in a watershed year. The transition from the millennium development goals to the sustainable development goals provides a pragmatic opportunity to advance the innovation agenda to ensure that the best innovations are scaled up and have maximum impact on saving and improving the lives of women and children by 2030. In this paper we propose challenges and solutions for the post-2015 period, aimed at meeting the goals of the Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health and the sustainable development goals.