Productive disruption: opportunities and challenges for innovation in infectious disease surveillance

* New innovations that could transform infectious disease surveillance and control, including the use of Big Data, mobile health approaches and cutting edge quantitative methods, offer hope for disrupting traditional health systems and improving health worldwide. * Much has been made of their potential, but very few have been translated successfully into policy or scaled up to a population level. * We argue that there is currently a lack of integration of new approaches, making them unsustainable or unrealistic for most national control programmes and that the gulf between academia and policy makers remains a major barrier to their implementation. * We propose that these innovations must be designed with direct input from national control programmes and embedded within already existing health systems.