Event Theme: Frugal Innovation in Surgery
There is increasing pressure on surgical services, the cost of delivering surgery and patient waiting times. Theatres and intensive care staff provide a vital role supporting all surgical activity across a range of elective, trauma, emergency and day care procedures. We are seeking medical technologies that result in dramatically lower-cost products and services within the theatres, anaesthesia and critical care setting but without comprising quality (by adopting approaches such as frugal innovation).
What are we looking for?
Idea or Problem Owners (Innovators)
We are aiming to engage 6-10 individuals/teams from NHS organisations in the region to participate. We are looking for Idea Owners with innovations in the broad area of medical technology (devices, diagnostics, software and eHealth) that meet unmet clinical needs. Such innovations will be primarily based upon NHS intellectual property (IP) that show the potential to create new company opportunities within the East of England. Problem Owners who don’t yet have a solution for their unmet need are also welcome.
Support Actors
Some of the Idea or Problem Owners may be from purely clinical backgrounds with no substantial experience of product design or hardware/software development, so they may need assistance in developing their idea and guidance in assessing the market opportunity, identifying the best development approach, selecting other delivery partners, quantifying the development costs and subsequent funding/investment needs and developing a sound commercialisation strategy. As such, we will be seeking to recruit the following participants:
- Clinical stakeholders, subject-matter experts and other NHS staff
- Software/hardware developers
- Academics/researchers
- Regulatory experts/consultants
- Business/marketing/strategy consultants
What Will Happen at the Event?
All participants will be invited to attend a ‘Beer and Pizza’ evening before the main event. This will be a mostly informal gathering aimed at giving the participants the opportunity to get to know each other in a relaxed setting. During the evening, the Idea Owners will pitch their ideas to the support actors. At the start of the following day, the support actors will then form diverse teams around the idea owners they would like to support for the rest of the day. NOTE – the organisers may need to re-allocate some support actors to other teams if the teams do not naturally balance themselves but we will try to be as flexible as possible.
Expected Outcomes
The judges will pick one or more of the ideas to go forward and pitch their idea to the MedTech Accelerator Investment Panel, with a chance of winning up to £125,000 of funding to develop the idea. The remaining projects will all be offered the opportunity for further mentoring and support from HEE & the EAHSN.
Further Information & Programme
Click here to view a detailed overview of the two-day event.
Vist the Medtech Accelerator Website for more information
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