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Open innovation – engage frontline!

by efn efn

The 8th European Innovation Summit (EIS), held by Knowledge4Innovation, is providing a good opportunity for the EU stakeholders to discuss with the MEPs, Commissioners and high-level EU policy makers, on the key challenges to Europe’s innovation performance and work towards an improved common understanding on the goals and needs to the benefit of the EU and its citizens.

Nowadays, wherever we look innovation & technology are there. At healthcare level, these are key components as ‘Innovation’ as a response to major societal challenges is not only about technologies designed by researchers in labs, it requires the involvement of the users, frontline, from the start of the design. Better connection and communication between science and society is urgently needed. But how will this work out in Horizon 2020?

The EU is facing a challenging future consisting of continuous decreases in health budgets that do not facilitate the creation of innovation and uptake of new technologies supporting the organisational aspects of nurses daily practice. Therefore, the review of Horizon 2020 will need to focus on frontline first! Engaging nurses in largescale proposals, in a systematic and coordinated way, will need to replace tradition work packages. Open innovation needs to follow frontline, and frontline will then follow open innovation. This is key to impact positively on the health ecosystem, instead of pushing for disruptive business models, which do not provide solutions for frontline, instead they create more challenges. Thus, Horizon 2020 need to be more innovative in structure, focussing on frontline engagement as crosscutting theme to reach deployment, and return on investment.

Furthermore, the robotics industry and nurses should work together to boost innovation to increase patient safety and support the nurses more in their clinical practice, and thus help to increase productivity and quality time spent with the people needing care. The technology industry should develop products that support the workforce frontline while the health professionals’ eSkills are further designed from that perspective, instead of IT managers and civil servants telling prescriptively what nurses and doctors need to do. As the single largest occupational group in healthcare, nurses have a critical but a constructive voice to play a key role in building strategic Intelligence capital within open innovations which should be ‘fit for purpose and practice’.