A conference on Innovation in Healthcare is being held in Cambridge, MA on Tuesday, February 1, 2011.

The speaker list is impressive and includes Michael Porter (Porter’s 5 forces model is well known to all MBA students), John Mendelsohn (President of MD Anderson), Janet Woodcock (Director of Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at FDA) and Peter Senge (author of the Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization).

The symposium, whose lead sponsor is Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, will discuss how to to improve the system for delivering healthcare services, and how to increase the productivity of translating biomedical research into medical innovation.  The conference certainly has ambitious goals in the topics it plans to cover!

Innovation to me is about adding value, whether that be in the delivery of a service or the development of a new product by a biotechnology company.  If you are in the Boston area on February 1, this one day symposium at MIT looks well worth attending, and the registration fee is inexpensive ($50).