Published on 15 April 2024
The Innovation Acceleration Program (IAP) enables healthcare professionals from Western Health, including nurses and midwives, to work with teams from the University of Melbourne to develop innovative solutions to unmet needs.
Inspired by past collaborations between Western Health and University of Melbourne the IAP:
- Provides an unique opportunity to Western Health staff – clinical and non-clinical – who have identified unmet needs within the healthcare system and want to develop innovative solutions supported by expert teams.
- Partners Western Health staff with teams of researchers, business developers, and experts in innovation, entrepreneurship, intellectual property, and venture capital investing from the University of Melbourne.
- Provides 12 weeks of customised support and five workshops on value proposition design and talking with stakeholders, business model design and testing, intellectual property, and pathways to funding.
- Supports teams to pitch for funding from $10,000-$100,000 to continue developing their innovations.
In doing so, the IAP aims to:
- Inspire healthcare professionals to become innovators, entrepreneurs, and problem-solvers at scale.
- Equip them with knowledge and experience in established innovation and entrepreneurship best practice.
- Connect them with researchers, business developers, and mentors from the University of Melbourne.
- Encourage an inter-organisational culture of collaborative innovation and opportunity creation.
- Guide them to identify problems worth solving and repeatable, scalable, impactful business models.
- Support them with seed funding to continue their journey of transforming obstacles into opportunities.
- Develop a pipeline for healthcare innovations, intellectual property, and start-ups in Victoria.
Submissions are now open, and close on 15 May 2024. Please contact Bill Karanatsis in the Office of Research with any enquiries.