iRaise: vehicle for adoption of innovation procurement

The innovation hype is all over the place. What's the deal with innovation? It's not new. Innovation is now mainstream management talk. It's gone from being the little i to becoming a CEO strategic priority topic. We are implementing open innovation of some sort. At the end, innovative ideas are rising and it's a must-do activity. But it's not the purpose. At the end of the journey, the final result is the adoption of innovative solutions.

In the health care sector innovation is growing. We need to understand what innovation entails, as we are addressing new territories. However, there are two paths (I'm simplifying here): the regular startup race vs the public procurement of innovation vehicle.

I tried the first one, three times, and I failed. I didn't complete the path to the market. And I lived the difficulties first hand. The product-market fit is the ultimate path towards adoption. And in this case, it's actually the intersection of the two paths: regular market driven innovation vs demand-driven innovation.

I learned about procurement of innovation three years ago. Somehow the scope is reversed. It's the unmet need that drives the market to try to solve a real need from the final user's perspective. It still entails a long journey. And a lot of hard work. This too is similar in both approaches. The big difference is that procurment of innovation (as the new trend of multistakeholder public-private partnership approach of open innovation) requires a lot of actors and circumstances to align. And this is actually what makes is a very attractive road to the market. A fairly new one too.

In the EU, the results from this public policy to increase the R&D public investment in demand-driven unmet needs started to develop maybe around ten years ago. Still the results from the first PCP/PPI are arriving to the final results. The road towards adoption of innovation procurement requires that long journey to be sheppared by different stakeholders that permeate their know-how and value to the entire process. But the starting point is key: a cross-border unmet need from the health care professionals, patients and citizens.

iRaise is an education programme that I am proud to be part of from it's first year. We are currently on the third edition of the course which was deliverd by Agència de Qualitat i Avaluació Sanitàries de Catalunya (AQuAS) , ITACA SABIEN , RISE Research Institutes of Sweden , Ticbiomed , Instituto Pedro Nunes , Servicio madrile?o de salud (SERMAS) , and funded EIT Health .

This week we are on the fourth week of the iRaise innovation adoption rainbow, our particular path that kickstarts the alignment of those multidisciplinary stakeholders that are going to drive their unmet needs forward. At the end of our course, the teams are introduced to the four vehicles they will have to adopt innovation: develop it yourself, find a partnership, directly procure it after you find a solution that already provides a solution to your need, or start a procurement of innovation project.

If you want to find out more about this awards check out this post.