The WHO/Europe Public Health Innovation Platform is a WHO-hosted mechanism that connects countries, institutions and innovators to translate high-potential public health solutions into scalable, system-level impact.

Objective

The Platform creates a regional co-creation space where priority public health challenges are matched with validated innovations, enabling countries to adopt, adapt and scale solutions more rapidly, equitably and sustainably.

About the Platform

The WHO/Europe Public Health Innovation Platform operationalizes the “Strategy on harnessing innovation for public health in the WHO European Region 2025–2030”, endorsed by the WHO European Region Member States at the 76^th Session of the WHO Regional Committee for Europe (RC76). It convenes the Member States, WHO collaborating centres, innovation partners and other stakeholders to accelerate the uptake and scale of solutions addressing pressing public health priorities.

Across the Region, many promising innovations remain confined to pilot phases or are insufficiently integrated into health systems, financing structures and decision-making processes. The Platform addresses this fragmentation by linking clearly defined public health needs with the partnerships, evidence and pathways required to move innovations from pilot to system-wide implementation.

Platform to address key challenges

The Platform is grounded in a region-wide prioritization process led by WHO/Europe in collaboration with the Technical Advisory Group on Building an Innovation Ecosystem for Public Health (TAG-BIEFPH). This process identifies high-impact “pain points” – persistent system challenges where innovation can drive measurable improvements in health outcomes, equity and resilience.

These priorities are organized into 9 thematic domains, which structure the Platform’s work and convene stakeholders around shared challenges. Within each domain, multistakeholder groups collaborate to define needs, co-develop and validate solutions and support their scale-up across countries.

The Platform’s activities will be delivered through a structured programme of engagement, including regular thematic meetings and collaborative working sessions conducted through both virtual and in-person formats. These interactions will provide opportunities for knowledge-sharing, peer learning, partnership building and joint problem-solving, ensuring continuous dialogue among Member States, WHO/Europe, technical experts, innovators and development partners.

What the Platform does

The Platform acts as a catalyst for translating innovation into public health impact by:

• identifying and curating solutions aligned with priority public health needs
• developing shared standards, tools and evidence to support adoption and scale
• facilitating policy, financing and regulatory pathways for implementation.

Group’s key outputs

Through this collaborative approach, the Platform generates practical, decision-oriented outputs, including:

• technical guidance and normative products
• implementation tools and operational frameworks
• policy and investment pathways to enable scale
• multicountry pilots generating actionable, decision-relevant evidence.