Jorge Juan Fernández: "The future of innovation won’t come from companies setting up teams but from teams setting up companies"
<p>Graduates of Health Design Barcelona have presented their business projects to professionals during the graduation ceremony</p>
After eight months of intense training and learning, the second class of Design Health Barcelona (d·HEALTH Barcelona) fellows graduated last week in a ceremony held at the Barcelona Science Park. The eight fellows have left the program equipped with not only specific knowledge but also personal and entrepreneurial skills that will allow them to develop viable solutions to the three unmet clinical needs detected during their stays at Hospital Clínic and Hospital Sant Joan de Déu in Barcelona.
The three teams of fellows presented the needs they have selected and the innovative solutions they are working on: urinary incontinence, breastfeeding and fecal incontinence.
“We don’t need more entrepreneurs; we need a stronger ecosystem,” said Biocat CEO Montserrat Vendrell at the event. d·HEALTH Barcelona aims to help improve the ecosystem for healthcare entrepreneurs with its disruptive learning and mentorship system.
Jorge Juan Fernández – Moebio academic director and director of e-Health and Health 2.0 at Hospital Sant Joan de Déu – presented the d·HEALTH Barcelona program to the audience. He spoke about Biodesign as a method for medtech innovation and how “design thinking has influenced innovators in health to focus on better understanding clinical needs as a starting point for the innovation process.” The clinical immersion of the d·HEALTH Barcelona fellows in local hospitals allowed them to identify more than 600 unmet clinical needs, Jorge Juan explained. Once they began to focus on these needs, each team of fellows had the chance to speak with more than 100 potential users and clients to validate their hypotheses.
d·HEALTH Barcelona is more concerned with creating innovators than innovations. “When everyone agrees that innovation and entrepreneurship are key to the future of our country, we must start to look for the most appropriate professional profiles, as the future of innovation won’t come from companies setting up teams but from teams setting up companies,” said Jorge Juan.
The guest of honor at the ceremony was Bryant Lin, medical-devices entrepreneur and medical director of the Consultative Medicine Clinic at Stanford University. Lin again highlighted that “innovation through design thinking is based on identifying needs” and that “all innovators in health have chosen the path of re-inventing medicine to help patients lead a better life.”
Biocat is currently looking for the third class of fellows for the program. d·HEALTH Barcelona is looking for fellows from the life and health sciences, but also those involved in engineering, design and business. In the words of Jorge Juan Fernández, "The magic happens at the crossroads, where different ways of thinking, approaches and skills come together."
More information on the d·HEALTH Barcelona program is available at www.moebio.org.