Last week’s Global Forum for Health Research meeting in Havana featured many talks about technology innovation. Buzzwords such as “capacity building,” “technology transfer,” and “innovation networks” were bandied about. Surprisingly, however, true product innovators were dramatically underrepresented at the meeting. There were a few basic scientists and almost no representatives of the most innovative sectors of the biopharma and diagnostics industries—the small to medium-sized companies whose lifeblood is turning basic discoveries into products that meet pressing health care needs. Product development experts, meaning professionals who can understand and assess technology but also have the bruises that come from interacting with regulators and customers, could have added to the rich discussions that were already occurring.

One leitmotif of the Forum might be paraphrased as: “We’ve got so many people afflicted by easily treatable or preventable illnesses who are not being helped. Why should we be making any investments in long-term and expensive technological innovations when we aren’t taking advantage of the tools we have today?” And these critics, a minority but a vocal group at the Forum, have an important point: we need to make sure we are doing what we can to alleviate human pain and suffering if a good solution exists today. But in all too many cases—the treatment and diagnosis of tuberculosis, prevention of HIV transmission, vaccination against malaria, and treatment of Chagas disease, for example—the available tools are inadequate, have too many side effects, or simply don’t exist. Thus we need to commit to innovative research and development to solve these and many other medical problems.

And so another theme, expressed powerfully by Melinda Moree, Interim CEO of BIO Ventures for Global Health, and Maria Freire, President of the Lasker Foundation, was that the choice between delivering products now or developing products for the future is a false dichotomy. We need both. Sometimes a good solution is available now but it is ensnared in financing, delivery, or intellectual property issues. We should without hesitation support the use of resources to address health problems that are currently solvable. Sometimes, however, the development of new and imaginative technologies stimulates the global health community with the art of the possible. Sometimes, the ability to treat disease with a novel approach is so transformative — as in the innovations of antiretroviral therapy for HIV — that it leads to revolutionary changes in patient health while strengthening health delivery systems in the process. (On a hopeful note, the initiation of phase 3 testing of a malaria vaccine, developed by GSK Biologicals in collaboration with the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, promises to be such a transformative technology.)

In several instances, academic or policy speakers at the Forum gave vacuous descriptions of product development. Product development was reduced to the transfer of academic research discoveries to manufacturing partners who could then make and sell a product. This caricature of product development does injustice to the many disciplines required to develop products as well as the unpredictable nature of biomedical innovation. So one way to strengthen subsequent meetings would be to include a subset of policy-minded product developers and entrepreneurs who can discuss what it actually takes to finance, organize, and mobilize a product development organization. It is only by bringing together a broad range of disciplines that we will discover new and innovative approaches to finding solutions for pressing global health problems.

David Cook is the Vice President of Business Development at BIO Ventures for Global Health.