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Health and Wellbeing Summer School 2015

Meeting startup Greeniant

Lecture on Finance by Alain le Loux

Team work

Friday work out

@work in family office Strijp-CS

Time for the final pitches

Winner is...

Team Situp

After 2 weeks it is time to go home...

EIT Digital organises each year 8 summer schools around Europe that are driven by the EIT Digital Action Lines. The reason why EIT Digital organises the summer schools is to drive innovation uptake; in the EIT Digital community and beyond. The summer schools are part of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship programme of the EIT Digital Master School and provide opportunities for students, researchers and business people to meet and work together. 

Health and Wellbeing

The Summer School on Health and Wellbeing (HWB) took place in the Co-location Centre Eindhoven at the High Tech Campus from 12 – 24 July. During the two weeks, the theme of ‘Health and Wellbeing’ was introduced through lectures and workshops on life style trends, and on ways to assess, measure and promote physical, cognitive and social wellbeing. Entrepreneurial capabilities had been enhanced and trained through master classes on specific business aspects as market research, finance and venturing. A substantial part of the summer school is dedicated to teamwork targeted on solving 8 real life business cases as delivered by partners of the Eindhoven node, Startups from the Health and Wellbeing business community and Health and Wellbeing innovation activities. Cracking these business cases requires an active working attitude and knowledge sharing of each team member under the auspice of two experienced coaches that monitor and drive the process. 

HWB Summer School: 51 students, 28 nationalities

Fifty-one international students followed this year’s Health and Wellbeing Summer School. Interesting to know is that the student population that worked intensively for 2 weeks, represented 28 nationalities. Also remarkable is that 1/3 of this year HWB summer school participants came from the EIT Digital Master School and 2/3 of the participants was recruited outside the Master School.  The latter group was selected out of 125 applicants mainly coming from EU countries. Of the 35 selected students there were 10 students who received an Outreach mobility grant for travel and lodging. The other 25 Students were able to make it on their own, to travel to Eindhoven and arrange lodging by themselves. The recruitment for finding and getting the right match of students started mid-March and was quite successful in gaining awareness outside the EIT Digital community as the figures show.  

Jean Gelissen, Action Line Leader Health and Wellbeing and the Summer School’s program chair said: “I am pretty proud that we could realise the HWB Summer School in the new Co-location Centre at the High Tech Campus, Eindhoven. Also I am very pleased that we were able to select this number of cooperative students with so many nationalities and different backgrounds. The HWB Summer School was an open, eager and inspirational working environment, created by the students, business case owners, coaches, lecturers and Co-location Centre staff all together. And the best part of this all: the teams worked their brains out to come up with the best solution!”

Levelling knowledge on Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Because the EIT Digital Summer schools are part of the Innovation & Entrepreneurship programme of the Master School it was quite a challenge to level the knowledge on Innovation & Entrepreneurship as the group was rather diverse, in back ground, age and experience. Luckily, the local organisers could rely on the EIT Digital Innovation & Entrepreneurship coordinators who developed, together with the EIT Digital on-line education initiative, a self-assessment test that all the students had to follow prior to the start. A hands-on crash workshop in classroom style was conducted the day before the Summer School kicked-off to get an equal level playing field for the following two weeks.  

Signed, Sealed and Delivered: 8 business solutions presented

The results of the teamwork were presented before a jury and the business case owners. The jury was composed of Fred Boekhorst (Senior Vice President Philips Research), Dimmes Doornhein (Serial Entrepreneur and Business Expert), Bert Gyselinckx (Programme Director and General Manager of Imec at Holst Centre), Nathalie Kerstens (I&E Coordinator Health and Wellbeing Summer Schools) and Jean Gelissen (Action Line Leader Health and Wellbeing).

Fred Boekhorst acted as Chair of the Jury and made some general remarks to all the students before the appraisal of the specific business propositions started. He said: “The jury is very pleased with what you have shown after 2 weeks of teamwork. We understand that such time-constraint impacts the depth of the work, but nevertheless we were impressed that most of the business cases presented, showed this maturity level. A strong point in all presentations was the use of an impactful opening statement as it immediate draws the attention to what matters in the business cases. All teams presented their cases with a lot of enthusiasm and passion.”

Of course, there are also improvement points and Fred said: “You all emphasized what investment level was required to pursue the next phase, but it was not clear in all cases how you would have invested it to minimize business risk. And we would have loved to see a little bit more of the business canvas in the presentations– as a business canvas model very systematically articulates the reasoning about the business proposition.”

Best Business Solution: Situp!

Each jury member presented the appraisal of certain cases. The comment was clear, sharp and mixed with suggestions for improvement. According the jury, one team stood-out from the rest in virtually all aspects, and that was the team ‘Situp’! 

The business case of this team was driven by the question what self-diagnostics could mean for a company. Team Situp proposed a self-diagnosis device to solve back pain, caused by wrong sitting ergonomics. They presented the problem statement in a very clear way and also their subsequent analysis of potential solutions and ultimate approach and implementation of a solution was believable and very clear.  It was well presented in a clear and crisp way and Fred Boekhorst mentioned the proposed business solution: “… a beauty through simplicity’. 

According to the applause of their fellow students they agreed with the jury's choice to award 'Situp' the victory of ‘Best entrepreneurial team’ of the EIT Digital HWB Summer School 2015!

Contact: Jean Gelissen

 

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