What’s in a name? Taxonomy for innovation in the health and aging sector

Innovation hub, innovation cluster, innovation system, regional innovation ecosystem, accelerator, living lab, innovation milieu… Have you googled any of these terms lately?

With the emergence of conversations on innovation in Canada, aligning with trends globally, these terms have been used (often interchangeably) to describe what regions, provinces and countries are working to achieve.

In the health and aging sector, the DRiVE team, working for AGE-WELL, investigate the partnerships and linkages among researchers, policy-makers, practitioners, industry, and citizens that are required to support health-tech and age-tech development, evaluation, commercialization and implementation. We have found ourselves perplexed by the lack of consistency in the terminology in this space.

We are working to resolve this confusion by building a taxonomy of innovation in the health and aging sector.

What we know at this point is that many of these concepts are nested and possibly hierarchical. However, some of these entities can stand alone- for example, it is unlikely that in the health innovation sector you would find an innovation hub, without a regional innovation ecosystem (RIE) or regional innovation systems (RIS) (which we know are synonymous terms).

We have reviewed the literature in this area and are now reaching out to self-described innovation hubs, clusters, and systems globally who are working in the health and aging space. We plan to learn from them about the decisions they make in the language they use to describe their actions and objectives.

So, are you like us and tangled up in all of this terminology? Are you tired of just googling around and want to have your say? We’d be delighted to hear from you.

Understanding the relationship between women’s entrepreneurship and regional innovation ecosystems!

An international team of researchers (Canada, Germany, Chile and the U.K.), including Drs Josephine McMurray, Katherina Kuschel, Heidi Sveistrup and Judith Sixsmith from the AGE-WELL NCE, have just completed an application to SSHRC for the Connection Grant. If successful, the Women Entrepreneurs, innovation and Regional Ecosystem Development (WEiRED) collaborative project will bring together international experts with an interest in women in entrepreneurship, health and age tech, and regional innovation ecosystems. The project has its genesis in the AGE-WELL DRiVE project led by Dr. McMurray and Dr. Sveistrup, and will address the critical gap between our theoretical and empirical understanding of systemic barriers to women’s participation in innovation and entrepreneurial activities.

Symposium and workshop planned for the summer

The grant will sponsor an event entitled “From Exception to Rule: The Role of Regional Innovation Ecosystems in the Development of Women Entrepreneurs” that has received inter-continental institutional support. If funded by SSHRC, WEiRED will conduct a two day symposium from June 15-16, 2017 in Waterloo, Ontario. Day 1 will focus on international perspectives concerning the role of regional innovation ecosystems in the opportunity-driven entrepreneurial activities of women, and Day 2 will address the question “Why in female-dominated sectors such as health and aging, is the entrepreneurial gender gap so evident?”  

Who is part of the organizing team?

Drs Josephine McMurray (Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada), Katherina Kuschel (Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada), Kerstin Ettl (Siegen University, Germany), Vesna Mandakovic Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile), Judith Sixsmith (University of Northampton, U.K.), and Heidi Sveistrup (University of Ottawa, Canada) are the symposium organizers. As leaders in related disciplines (regional innovation ecosystems, women and entrepreneurship) these researchers have developed an impressive network of external partners from other universities and research institutes, government, industry, non-governmental organizations and civil society. Their facilitation of this symposium will play a vital role in not only enhancing research collaborations, but also in furthering the international discourse on women entrepreneurs and regional innovation ecosystems. A post-symposium workshop on June 17th will bring together partners interested in pursuing new areas of research identified at the symposium.

And in the meantime...

WEiRED has prepared a scoping review for the 2017 DIANA Conference (USA), a conceptual paper for the Conference of Economic, Technological, and Societal Impacts of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (Germany), and a PDW proposal on women techpreneurs for the 2017 Academy of Management Conference (USA).


If you are interested, please follow our WEiRED project updates here, or drop us a line at kkuschel@wlu.ca

EngAGEtechKW: A workshop on understanding older adults' experiences of technology adoption in the Kitchener-Waterloo Region

Click on the title above to leave a comment 

On Wednesday November 9th 2016, two groups of researchers from AGE-WELL partnered with Communitech, to host a workshop that brought together older adults, their caregivers, and other stakeholders working in this area, with those who are developing innovations for health and aging. 

This event took place at the Tannery at Communitech, which for those of you who don`t know about Communitech, check out their website- they are an industry-led innovation centre that supports, fosters and celebrates a community of about 1,000 tech companies.

As an HQP in WP7 with a passion for engaging older adults in health and aging innovation I was excited to partner with WP1 to bring their hands-on and interactive workshop to the Kitchener-Waterloo (KW) region to provide an opportunity for older adults to interact closely with technologies currently in development, providing developers with valuable feedback on its usability and older adults an opportunity to have their say.

From WP7, researchers and students from Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Waterloo, and from WP 1, representatives from Ontario Shores Center for Mental Health Sciences partnered to achieve the following 6 workshop objectives:

1) Understand how older adults make decisions regarding technology acquisition and use;

2) Identify the obstacles or barriers to adoption of technologies by older people;

3) Work collaboratively with a variety of stakeholders;

4) Develop an understanding of Waterloo Wellington region’s innovation ecosystem from the perspective of a variety of stakeholders, and how it fosters the development of technologies that support health and aging;

5) Contribute to the creation of a model to guide active collaboration with older adults and their caregivers in regional innovation ecosystems; and

6) Provide an opportunity for a variety of stakeholders to comment on policy and regulatory issues relevant to new technologies and innovation to support health and aging.

We were delighted by the overwhelming community response to bring older adults, caregivers, researchers, decision- makers, folks working in the health and aging sectors, and the tech community together! As we in the AW network know, a key part of the AGE-WELL mission is to involve those folks who we are working to innovate for. The projects coming together for this workshop are great examples of this engagement.

In WP 7, PRITECH aims to understand the regulatory and policy environment for aging technologies and innovation by collaborating with policy makers and those working in industry to better understand this environment. In the DRiVE project we are working to understand the regional environment or ecosystem that is needed to support the innovation process by collaborating with the stakeholders who are important in these communities.

In WP 1 they are working to understand the role of older adults in technology design, development, and commercialization by involving older adults in their work.

As much as this workshop was a research activity, we were also able to have some fun! During the lunch hour, our Communitech partners arranged a tour and put together a selfie booth- complete with silly hats and a giant plush giraffe- for participants to enjoy.

Preliminary review of the evaluations have been positive, with one participant commenting:

“I was intimidated before I arrived given that I don't consider myself a techie.  However, I didn't even think of that especially when I started listening to others with the products they tried and just trying "gadgets".  I confess to being a gadget junkie - can't afford to buy a lot of them but love getting to learn to use them.  …  I look forward to more of these types of sessions and am spreading the word among my friends and acquaintances.” (Older adult workshop participant).

As we wrapped up the day, a participant asked “how can we keep in touch and maintain the connections we have made today” … to me, this was the best feedback we could have asked for. My vision is for older adults and their caregivers to be meaningfully engaged in innovation ecosystems for health and aging. There is so much potential in the KW region to open the door to the possibilities and market development that comes from a growing segment of people over the age of 65 who are willing and eager to adopt new technologies that will help them live better lives more independently. We see this event as beginning a relationship between stakeholders in the KW region and are excited to keep the momentum going as the ecosystem develops!

As a start to keeping the connections made between folks, we have created a community space on our website for folks to post pictures, comments, links, etc. related to the workshop and follow up opportunities. Please visit this space here to help keep the momentum going:

https://www.drive-health-ecosystems.com/community-health-innovation-ecosystems/

A final note of thanks to the researchers, students, and of course participant support from both within the AW WPs involved and beyond.

DRiVE-ing our project’s objectives and outputs to stakeholders: Highlights from our team’s participation to the AGE-WELL 2016 Annual General Meeting

Click on the Title above to leave a comment

Collaboration, co-production, commercialization – These key themes stood out to us over many of the presentations we heard and conversations we heard at the AGE-WELL annual meeting.  We also heard about the challenges we have in Canada to translate knowledge from research into commercially viable products and processes to ultimately reach our collective AGE WELL goal of helping older Canadians maintain their independence, health and quality of life. The inspiring conversations and networking continued through our time at the Canadian Association on Gerontology’s (CAG) conference.

For those of us on the The DRiVE team, who are passionate about resolving this struggle and understand these key themes, we were energized by the discussions in Montreal at both the AGE-WELL 2016 annual general meeting, October 18th-20th and the CAG annual conference from October 20th-22nd 2016.

We were happy to be able to share our work from our first year including presentations including:

  1. Creating a Theory of Action for regional health innovation ecosystems which we believe will have an important impact on our AGE-WELL network through;

  2. HQP Heather McNeil’s ECOTECH PhD thesis on engaging older adults in Regional Health Innovation Ecosystems;

  3. Our work with CC2 on emerging Canadian innovation health and aging hubs;

  4. Our inventory and map to support our international survey looking for the factors that helped build and sustain ecosystems or innovation entities; and

  5. Results from one of our case studies- Innovation Boulevard in Surrey British Columbia.

We are especially excited by the interactions we had at the Demo and Drinks event where we were grateful to gather feedback on our work and learn of a couple of new international innovation entities in health and aging innovation. A big thank you to our team member Crystal Gill Herrera, Master’s student, for doing a wonderful job staffing our demo.

Two of the other highlights for us also involved our HQP!

  • Our soon to be joining the team PDF- Katherina Kutchel, PhD- joined us at the conference. It was wonderful to meet with her face to face and engage in productive planning and team building.

  • Congratulations to Heather McNeil, PhD student and research associate on the DRiVE team, who received the 2016 Schlegel-University of Waterloo Research Institute for Aging Scholarship by the Canadian Association for Gerontology http://cagacg.ca/awards/schlegel-ria/

We look forward to continuing the collaboration with stakeholders both within and beyond the AGE-WELL and CAG networks. As a start to this continued collaboration, please visit our interactive international innovation in health and aging entity Map.