We will launch our innovation call soon to scout innovative entrepreneurs and individuals with promising solutions to the most pressing health and care challenges in our project regions.

The innovation call is the core element of the D-CARE innovation programme in which we aim to sustainably generate effective and user-oriented smart health and care services and develop new business opportunities at the same time. In five project regions we gather stakeholders from relevant industries and businesses, including investors, from academia, from politics and administration as well as end users in an exceptional network, the Smart Care Labs. These consortia of quadruple helix stakeholders are ideal breeding grounds to develop, test and validate innovations - a glance across the Atlantic to the breeding grounds of Facebook, Tesla or AirBnB in Silicon Valley confirms this approach. 

The idea is that each of the stakeholder groups can bring product or service ideas or some needs and demands into the network which then can develop, test or validate innovations or start a call for proposals for unsolved challenges. Each stakeholder group in the framework contributes and important part to the development of successful innovations and profits from the cooperation at the same time: businesses develop ideas and at the same time receive feedback from their users/consumers and get access to funding. Academia accompanies the innovation process and provides data about factors of success and failure as well as the performance of innovative products and services. They in turn can tap into a vast potential of real-life, interesting research projects. Political and administrative actors can offer expertise on current (legal) regulations and alter them to accomodate societally valuable innovations. In return they can provide for their social care duties via bringing in challenges and getting solutions from businesses. Users lastly represent an invaluable source of feedback both for political actors as well as businesses that is rarely available in product development. On the other hand they can directly participate and influence the development of "tailormade" products and services that they will use in their daily lives. The innovation network becomes a sustainable engine of innovation in a region and business area because all actors draw considerable profit from their participation.

With our innovation call we want to initiate this innovation framework for the smart health and care areas in our eight project regions. We have set up country working groups that have defined the most pressing issues in their area and will manage the applications from the innovation call. Our best applications will receive the D-CARE innovation prize as a recognition and gain access to our exceptional national and transnational quadruple helix stakeholder networks. Some of them we will involve in a co-creation and pilot phase in Spring next year. We are excited for receiving lots of bright ideas!