Design Healthcare Innovation is the result of a research project started in 2017, developed alongside Sanofi with the support of Fondazione Politecnico. Its main goal was to build a theoretical framework and a methodological structure in order to identify, map, and systematize projects and innovative product-service experiments able to illustrate the ongoing transformation of the healthcare field in Italy.
This research activity was later extended to involve several subjects who are the main characters of this transformation: patients and their associations, caregivers, institutional scientific research facilities, university spin-offs, medtech start-ups all the way up to the huge network of manufacturers in the biomedical field, and also new entities, such as makerspaces and Fab Labs, which have officially become part of this transformation.
All that has made it possible to devise an overall scenario of transformation of the healthcare field and its main directives: from the dissemination of digital technologies capable of enabling the transformation of custom products and services, up to the increasingly important role of patients in healthcare innovation processes. As a matter of fact, the latter volunteer ever more frequently as active subjects (think of the patient innovation phenomenon) who, often starting from an individual need and collaborating with other subjects, are able to trigger innovation processes that will later impact the whole community.
This research has ultimately made it possible to shape and graphically view the whole of subjects and solutions of the healthcare system (the Ecosystem) and the design project underlying the development of new products (the Ladder).
