The CMU Portugal Program, supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), signed on April 9th, an agreement with NOVA Medical School and the Nova School of Business and Economics (Nova SBE) to launch the CMU Portugal Patient Innovation Accelerator. This joint initiative is a new milestone in the healthcare innovation landscape in Portugal, aiming to boost advanced healthcare solutions and foster entrepreneurship in the sector.
The signature event took place at NOVA Medical School, with the presence of Madalena Alves, FCT President; Inês Lynce, National Co-Director of the CMU Portugal Program; Pedro Oliveira, NOVA SBE Dean, and Helena Canhão, Nova Medical School Dean.
The Patient Innovation Bootcamp is an acceleration program currently underway and funded by EIT Health, held in Lisbon, Barcelona, and Copenhagen. The Bootcamp aims to support patients and informal caregivers in implementing and scaling innovative solutions developed to address their health challenges, coordinated by Nova SBE and NOVA Medical School with Copenhagen Business School, IESE Business School, BioCat.
The CMU Portugal Patient Innovation Accelerator will allow Patient Innovation Bootcamp participants to advance to an additional acceleration phase, during which they will receive support to expand and develop their businesses at the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. Collaborating with the CMU Portugal Program, the participants will engage in various activities, including workshops, product development support, mentoring, networking, investor presentations, expansion into the American market, corporate partnerships, and sustainability strategies. The goal is further to accelerate the growth of startups in the ecosystem, focusing on applying expertise in artificial intelligence.
The Patient Innovation Platform (PI) was launched in 2014 as an outcome of CMU Portugal project TEIPL. The online platform allows patients and caregivers around the world connect to share the solutions they developed themselves or had the help from collaborators to cope with a health-related problem.
“The CMU Portugal Program has a strong tradition of supporting entrepreneurial teams aiming to commercialize products or services in the ICT field. On the other hand, the Patient Innovation platform resulted from one of the partnership-supported projects. It is now a great pleasure to see these two features of the Program coming together to give rise to the CMU Portugal Patient Innovation Accelerator. This health-focused acceleration program will certainly be another successful initiative” shares Inês Lynce, co-director of the CMU Portugal Program.
The inaugural initiative of the new CMU Portugal Patient Innovation Accelerator will be happening on April 10th on the occasion of the Nova SBE Haddad Entrepreneurship Institute’s 2nd Anniversary.