On 26 February, the Action Line Health and Wellbeing pre-call workshop took place in the Co-location Centre Eindhoven. Although there are pre-call workshops scheduled in Helsinki and in London, the attention for the Eindhoven workshop was rather high with 65 registered partners coming from the UK, Finland, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands.
Strategy Health and Wellbeing
The workshop started with a welcome by the Action Line Leader Jean Gelissen, followed by an introduction to the Call 2016 and the Strategic Innovation Agenda 2014-2016 ‘Blended Life in a Connected World’. The strategy of Health and Wellbeing is rather clear: Align with the H2020 objective to keep people at work for 2 more years and keep people living independently for 2 more years.
The focus is on the primary prevention areas. As Jean mentioned a couple of time: “ An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” The ambition is to reduce the demand for expensive healthcare by detecting small physical and mental health issues at an early stage and avoid larger health problems by suitable lifestyle interventions.
Business in the centre of all HWB activities
Another important topic that was highlighted in the workshop was the possibility to collaborate with the companies of the Health and Wellbeing Business Community. These companies were presented by Filip Coenen, Business Developer based in Eindhoven. He underlined the strategy that the EIT ICT Labs Business Accelerator has to be in the centre of all innovation activities. This means already from the beginning, as we are speaking about drafting proposals for the Call 2016 that is the basis for the Business Plan 2016. As Jean added to the presentation of Filip: “You are here at EIT ICT Labs, we bring innovations into market.”
After the informative presentations of Jean Gelissen and Filip Coenen, the floor was for the audience to pitch ideas: 27 partners signed up for a 5 minute pitch. The lunchtime in between the pitches was used to already match and network. After the pitches the group went out in breakouts with the purpose to discuss and match the best ideas, fit and combinations. At the end of the day a plenary feedback was held and it appeared that about 9 drafts for proposals were distilled.
Key dates for the Health and Wellbeing Call 2016 process
February 26 | Eindhoven pre-call workshop |
March 12 | London pre-call workshop |
March 17 | Helsinki pre-call workshop |
March 25 | Publication of Call for Proposals for 2016 |
April 15 - 17 | EIT ICT Labs Partner Event (Trento) |
May 22 | Submission deadline |
June 15 - 18 | Consensus Meetings for Innovation Action Lines |
June 22 - 26 | Initial feedback to proposal authors and initial update of Activity proposal (when required) |
June 30 - July 2 | Management Committee decision-making meeting |
July 6 - 17 | Feedback to proposal authors incl. ABCX classification; update of Activity proposal when required |
Contact: jean.gelissen@eitictlabs.eu