EIT Digital Summer School

We were extremely pleased to be invited to contribute to EIT Digital Summer, the event took place at Futures Cities Catapult in London. The audience was a keen international masters students community with over 23 nationalities represented. Our experience with startups enable us to share some experiences where our valuable “ learn by doing it “ approach could be witnessed. Check the teaser video here Digital Salutem contributed to the London Node, which explored ICT in Health and Wellbeing. Innovating is health and wellbeing is not a straight forward task, with so many complexities and variables to consider a challenging proposition is certainly on the cards. Having said that health and wellbeing is a very exciting sector especially when you bring IT into the equation. The take away from our workshop was : “ Never give up on your dreams “ However, we share first hand experiences. Which …….. Global and societal trends like the ageing population and growing consumer empowerment demand an innovative and entrepreneurial ICT-enabled & -supported approach to Health and Wellbeing. Healthcare costs continue to increase while the available budget and the number of caretakers are shrinking. The HWB Action Line focuses on ICT-based solutions that reduce the demand for expensive healthcare by detecting still relatively small (mental & physical) problems early and avoiding larger health events by suitable lifestyle interventions. The same as in the Eindhoven summer school, the HWB theme will be introduced through lectures and workshops on life style trends, and on ways to assess, measure (“quantified self”) and promote fitness and mental wellbeing. Through the two weeks you will work in teams of five-to-six students on projects. Companies and start-ups of the Health and Wellbeing Business Community will provide the lifestyle oriented cases. The emphasis is on developing a value proposition and the associated marketing strategy & business plan. The first week will introduce the topic of health and wellbeing and will explore the trends in the western world and developing countries that form a hazard for our health and wellbeing, and what it will take to reverse these trends. After the introduction of the cases, you will explore the markets and user profiles and explore the product and service concepts followed by an introduction and workshop on business models for health and wellbeing. Finally, we explore usability aspects and social aspects that are detrimental or beneficial for a healthy lifestyle. We finish the first week with pitch training and a pitch session on the first proposals. During the weekend we will participate in several cultural and outdoor activities. The second week will explore the marketing and business aspects. They will pay a visit to innovation labs and incubators and they will explore different aspects of venturing and starting your own company. There will be presentations by several high-tech start-up companies and they will be able to meet and discuss your ideas with young entrepreneurs. The week will end with a final pitching session in front of a business panel. The programme enable the students to get hands on experience with real life cases, giving them insights about challenges and barriers when developing health and wellness solutions for public purposes. In our workshop we can assure that the students displayed high levels of business awareness, specially from a star up context and when we asked them about Entrepreneurship they surprised each other with outstanding insights and innovative ideas. The event was extremely successful and we would like to thank the EIT Digital Team for having us and all the students for their efforts to make our workshop an enjoyable experience to all involved. You could check my presentation in Slideshare For more information of Digital Salutem click here