Setting strategic objectives for the coalition for epidemic preparedness innovations: An exploratory decision analysis process

Abstract

The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) was established in 2016 in response to the West African Ebola epidemic. The vision for CEPI is to develop vaccines to prevent future emerging infectious disease outbreaks from becoming humanitarian crises. Leaders from governments, foundations, industry, and civil society convened earlier that year to formulate strategic objectives to support CEPI’s first business plan. We demonstrate how decision analysis can support a rational and transparent approach to strategy formulation that accounts for and ranks the preferences of multiple stakeholders in an international coalition setting. We use value-focused thinking to identify and structure objectives and we combine this with an explorative discrete-choice experiment to elicit preferences between objectives. Our findings suggest that decision-analytic methodologies can rationalize strategic objective setting in a highly complex global health research and development planning context characterized by strong stakeholder interests and conflicting priorities.