Health Pioneers

• Digital healthcare and wellbeing
• Medical technologies

Researchers with MedTech or digital health-centered innovations or research ideas.

Online Learning (8 modules) – Participants join a structured learning journey combining expert-led teaching sessions, practical workshops, and group and individual mentoring. Throughout the programme, researchers develop the key elements required to transform healthcare innovations into market-ready solutions, including stakeholder analysis, user needs validation, intellectual property strategy, regulatory pathways, reimbursement considerations, business models, development roadmaps, and funding strategies.

Module 1 – Healthcare Innovation & Entrepreneurial Foundations: Introduction to the healthcare innovation ecosystem and the first steps towards entrepreneurship. Participants learn how to position their projects within the healthcare innovation cycle, identify relevant stakeholders, analyze competitive landscapes, and define initial value proposition hypotheses. The session focuses on understanding the specific dynamics of healthcare entrepreneurship, including the roles of users, prescribers, decision-makers, partners, and competitors.

Module 2 – User-Centered Design & Adoption in Healthcare: Exploring how healthcare innovations are shaped by real-world users, clinical workflows, and adoption constraints. Participants apply user-centered design approaches to identify clinical needs, define use cases, understand healthcare pathways, and anticipate barriers to implementation. They develop user journeys and identify key pain points to guide solution refinement and future co-creation activities with clinicians and patients.

Module 3 – Intellectual Property & Research Valorization: Understanding how intellectual property strategy supports the transition from research outcomes to healthcare applications. Participants explore patents, know-how, software, trademarks, and trade secrets, while learning how to navigate ownership questions, freedom-to-operate considerations, licensing opportunities, technology transfer pathways, and venture creation options.

Module 4 – Business Model Design for Healthcare Innovations: Developing sustainable business models adapted to the complexity of healthcare markets, where users, customers, payers, and beneficiaries may differ. Participants learn how to structure value creation and capture, identify relevant stakeholders, define payer hypotheses, understand purchasing decisions, and develop initial market access and revenue assumptions.

Module 5 – Regulatory Pathways & Market Access: Introduction to the regulatory frameworks shaping healthcare innovation, including medical devices, diagnostics, and digital health solutions. Participants learn how to identify applicable regulatory requirements, map development and approval pathways, understand compliance risks, and explore practical aspects of regulatory audits and quality requirements.

Module 6 – Reimbursement & Economic Sustainability: Exploring how reimbursement mechanisms, funding models, and healthcare purchasing processes influence commercialization decisions. Participants learn how to identify funders, buyers, and decision-makers, understand healthcare coverage systems, and develop initial medico-economic hypotheses to support long-term sustainability.

Module 7 – Healthcare Innovation Development Roadmap: Translating previous learning into a structured development plan from scientific validation to market adoption. Participants define critical milestones, resources, partnerships, and funding requirements while building a realistic roadmap aligned with MedTech and digital health development cycles. The module combines group roadmap development with individual project challenges and feedback.

Module 8 – Funding Strategy & Investor Readiness: Preparing participants to identify appropriate funding pathways and communicate their projects effectively to funders, investors, and strategic partners. Participants explore grants, public programmes, competitions, loans, and private investment opportunities, while developing funding strategies and practicing investor-facing pitches tailored to different project maturity levels.

Mentoring – Throughout the programme, participants receive structured guidance from healthcare innovation experts, entrepreneurs, startup managers, technology transfer professionals, and industry specialists. Each module includes dedicated group mentoring sessions focused on applying the learning directly to participants’ projects, including stakeholder mapping, user journey analysis, IP strategy, payer identification, regulatory preparation, roadmap development, and funding prioritization. Selected modules also include individual mentoring sessions, providing tailored feedback on project challenges, strategic decisions, and pitch preparation.

Time commitment – The expected workload during the online programme is approximately 4–5 hours per week, including live sessions, independent work, and preparation of weekly deliverables.

In-Person Bootcamp (3 days, Lille)

• Understand the key steps required to transform health research results into innovation opportunities and market pathways.
• Develop a clear value proposition based on needs, user expectations and market relevance.
• Explore intellectual property, regulatory, reimbursement and funding strategies specific to digital health and medtech innovation.
• Strengthen entrepreneurial and communication skills through mentoring, workshops and pitching exercises.
• Build connections with industry experts, SMEs and existing start-ups, investors, healthcare stakeholders and innovation support organisations across Eurasanté's ecosystem.