From 31 August to 4 September, the Patient Innovation Bootcamp took place, at NOVA School of Business and Economics, in Carcavelos. This first edition of the Bootcamp was organized by Patient Innovation (a project based at NOVA Medical School) in collaboration with Glintt and the solutions presented were focused in many different health conditions such as cystic fibrosis, vision loss, eczema and the recent COVID-19.
During this week, 11 teams have learnt how to bring to the market the solutions they previously created to overcome difficulties caused by a specific health condition. There were talks with national and international marketing and business experts. Moreover, participants also had the opportunity to benefit from the expertise of several specialists in health care institutions, such as Centro de Formação e Simulação do Hospital da Luz.
The advantages of this Bootcamp were not exclusive for the participants, but also for the Patient Innovation team. In fact, organization members were “able to contact and network and with the incredible panel of experts” and to focus “on the feedback and insights from the 11 participant teams (…) which will help us improve our own work helping patients and caregiver take their own solutions to the market”, says Ana Rita Ribeiro, researcher from the EPIDOC Unit - Epidemiology of Chronic Diseases and Health Disease group and member of Patient Innovation.
This exciting and collaborative experience was continued for two other moments! There was a second and a third edition, held, respectively, in Barcelona (14-18 September) and Copenhagen (19-23 October), organized by the remaining project partners: IESE School and Biocat, at Barcelona, University of Copenhagen and Smile Incubator, at Copenhagen.
To wrap up this initiave, partipating teams will also be part of EIT (European Institute of Innovation and Technology) Bootcamp tour next November, promoted by EIT Health, one of the project sponsors. In Ana Rita Ribeiro’s opinion, the next meetings will be more useful for the participants to improve their solutions: “we will benefit from all the feedback we get from this first Patient Innovation Bootcamp, which will help us improve the program and make it even more tailored to address each team’s needs”.
