Advancing innovation in clinician entrepreneurship

Understanding innovation pathways to advance opportunities for clinician entrepreneurs

• Investigators

  • • Associate Professor Leah Heiss
    • Professor Daphne Flynn
    • Monika Engelhard
    Monash Art, Design and Architecture
  • • Associate Professor Khoa Cao
    Monash Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences
  • • Andrew Carey
    • Shama Kazmi
    Monash Institute of Medical Engineering

• Co-investigators

  • • Dr Gretchen Coombs
    • Sara Daly
    • Remedios Perez Escobar, Research Assistant
    • Hatoun Ibrahim, Research Assistant
    Monash Art, Design and Architecture

• Partner organisations

  • Safer Care Victoria

• Funded by

  • Safer Care Victoria

• Undertaken within

  • Design Health Collab
  • Emerging Technologies Research Lab

“Healthcare innovation is critical when you are thinking of revolutionising a healthcare system. To do this you need to listen to clinicians, you need to listen to consumers, you need to listen to carers, but you also need to have industry engaged with government, and the small to medium enterprise, the startup community to really shift the dial and get the change we need.”

Professor Jane Burns

Safer Care Victoria (SCV) aims to work across community groups, consumers, healthcare workers and industry sectors in order to help health services deliver better, safer and more equitable healthcare to Victorians. Recognising that the need to improve service delivery into the future will require significant advances in technology, SCV is undertaking a program to contribute to advancing innovation in healthcare. This includes developing partnerships with leaders in healthcare innovation across the spectrum of technology development, and developing best practices to ideate and solve problems.

In order to better understand innovation pathways and ways to advance opportunities for clinician innovators in complex healthcare contexts, we collaborated with SCV and the Monash Institute for Medical Engineering (MIME) to co-design an education module for clinician innovators. The first stage of this work was a co-design workshop held at the Melbourne Zoo in mid-2023 that brought together 65 clinicians, healthcare workers, entrepreneurs and educators to map the barriers and enablers to clinician-led innovation.

The outcomes of the workshop informed the development of the SCV Foundations of Medical Technology Innovation, developed in partnership with MIME.