The Potsdam Workshop
The workshop concerned the key issues and trends relating to innovation in regional health economies. The aim was to enable participating regions to develop a wider understanding of this topic. In particular, it looked at how partner regions create a landscape that promotes and sustains health and medical related innovations together with effective adoption of innovation in the regional health sector.
To understand such a landscape there are a number of basic questions:
- What are the sources of innovation development that can improve the quality of health and social care in your regions (e.g. SMEs, health & social professionals, larger businesses, university researchers)?
- Do health/social/medical R&D clusters exist in your regions? If yes, how have they developed? If no, do R&D clusters exist for other areas that could have value for use of their innovations in health & social care?
- How can we bring together people from different sectors to create innovation ideas and support their development?
- Should innovations have social benefits as well as make a profit? If yes, how? If no, why not?
The workshop ran from the 30th May to the 1st June 2007 and was hosted by the Brandenburg Economic Development Board – ZAB. Participants engaged in a dialogue to identify and understand the following elements of successful and sustainable health innovation landscapes:
- Planning for innovation
- Technical innovation
- Managing innovation
- Adopting innovation
- Anticipating innovation