MAKETOCARE(2). SUPPORTING PATIENT INNOVATION FROM IDEAS TO MARKET

The paper presents the results of the second edition of MakeToCare, a research project conducted in Italy (since 2017) to explore and define a grassroots innovation ecosystem in healthcare. The MakeToCare Ecosystem is an area for developing product-services co-designed by patient and caregiver innovators collaborating with actors operating in the healthcare research system, med-tech companies, and digital fabrication spaces. The paper investigates a crucial topic for grassroots innovators in healthcare: how to evolve bottom-up solutions conceived for the individual care into real product-services that can be distributed in the market. Many solutions developed by patient innovators are designed for socalled orphan markets (Canhão, 2017; Nesta Health Lab, 2016), but the majority of them, although effective, cannot scale-up because of a complex regulation system and the long-term, challenging and expensive bureaucratic processes required to make the solutions marketable. The first part of the paper introduces the MakeToCare Ecosystem, with 180 actors and 120 projects found in Italy, to establish the first connections with the theme of patient-innovation. The second part introduces the MakeToCare Ladder, a tool designed to analyze the innovation processes to develop healthcare solutions. The MTC Ladder consists of four phases: ideation, entrepreneurial development, regulatory verification, and distribution. It can be used to compare innovation processes developed by patient, caregivers and independent innovators. The final part synthesizes the results of the MakeToCare research while evidencing emerging issues and challenges for the user-driven and independent innovation in the field of healthcare.