Today, Europe’s innovation ecosystems are being tested by extreme circumstances. Standing with their member companies and their ecosystem actors, EU|BICs (Business Innovation Centres) have been acting responsive, and are willing to lead with bold action on digitalisation, innovation and sustainability.
The 2020 EBN Congress brings together all kinds of exceptional innovators to exchange ideas, foster co-learning, and understanding and on a wide range of subjects – to provoke forward-thinking on local/regional/EU strategies for boosting entrepreneurial innovation.
In this framework, we would highlight the workshop “Mission-driven health-ecosystems– From Abstract Responsible, Research and Innovation Practices to Concrete Business Action” taking place on 4 November, 11:45-12:30h CET.
The surge of Covid-19 greatly highlighted the challenges and pressures that European healthcare systems are facing. Among the challenges that are pushing for significant changes are an ageing population, increasing prevalence of chronic diseases, access to healthcare services during and in a post-COVID-19 era, just to mention a few.
Science and technology are transformative forces that have granted humans the capacity to alter ecosystems, the Earth’s climate, and even the building blocks of matter and life itself. Research and innovation have improved our world and our lives in many ways and will most likely continue to do so. However, parallel to the large positive impact on human welfare and wellbeing, science and technology sometimes create new risks and ethical dilemmas, fail in solving the problems they are meant to, and spur controversy.
In this changing and challenging times for the healthcare sector, responsible and participatory approaches to healthcare innovation can offer interesting reflections for different societal actors. Within the Health sector, there is a steadily growing number of innovative, new technologies being introduced in health systems (e.g. wearable devices, robotics, genomics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, mobile applications, etc.) that raise complex challenges for all stakeholders, including policymakers, regulatory authorities, payers, physicians and patients. The current ways in which new health technologies are being financed, developed, and brought to market make health systems increasingly inequitable and unsustainable.
The session aims at discussing how regional innovation ecosystems can improve citizens’ health and wellbeing and how different innovation players can collaborate. Different players of regional innovation ecosystems can play a role in this transition towards a more sustainable healthcare sector.
The session has been inspired by the work EBN and EBN members CyRIC and CEEI Murcia are carrying out in the framework of CHERRIES project, which aims at testing RRI and demand driven approaches to inform and shape regional (smart specialisation) innovation strategies in the healthcare sector.
CHERRIES project is very well aligned with the current challenges healthcare innovation ecosystems are facing in Europe, which call for new regional innovation policies able to better respond to these needs, not only in an emergency framework but in a (eco)systemic manner.
In this framework, the role of intermediaries such as EU|BICs – due to their capacity to act as brokers within regional innovation ecosystems – is fundamental to facilitate the mobilisation of both the demand and supply side of the innovation chain and engage.
In this session we invited speakers who will enrich the discussion on how the healthcare innovation ecosystems are changing from different perspectives:
- Moyses Moyseos, Operations Manager at Gravity Incubator – CyRIC – moderator
- John Rigby, the University of Manchester / Bibliometrica LtD
- Magda Krakowiak, Head of Open Innovation at EIT Health
- Lydia Montando, Business Development Director at ATOS Spain
The panel discussion will be followed by a 30 minutes networking session, where attendees will be able to directly interact with the panelists and network with other participants.
Join this year’s EBN Congress to connect, learn and discover regional deployment of innovation and entrepreneurship actions and how innovation ecosystem actors can play a greater role in the digital and sustainable twin-transition within their regions.