From the 29th till the 31st of March, the project consortium was in Porto for the 3rd official Interregional Seminar of the HELIUM project. On the 29th the consortium was invited to attend the Health Cluster Portugal even – Health and Wealth Through Innovation. The official HELIUM program started on the 30th and was focused on Lets-Blend-It stage of the project.
The overall goal of the Lets-Blend-It stage is the exploitation of the newly acquired knowledge through knowledge transfer (adapting and implementing Good Practices in other regions), knowledge multiplication (further strengthening and improving Good Practices based on experiences of other regions), and knowledge blending (linking and connecting well-functioning components of the health innovation experimental landscape at interregional level).
This exchange of experience process was split over two days and featured interactive sessions with moderation from both Mindshake Portugal, an organisation specialised in the development of creative thinking processes, and Thomas More Kempen, advisory project partner in HELIUM responsible for the overall methodology. As a results of this in-depth engagement partners have been able to uncover Good Practices which are potentially valuable for the respective regions and develop some preliminary steps to be undertaken.
Alongside this interactive programme we had the opportunity to experience some of the Good Practices the Norte region has to offer within HELIUM. These included the Cosiness Programme, Animas Association, Fraunhofer Fall Competence Center, Labiomep Porto Biomechanics Laboratory, IS4Health, Patient Innovation, and Virtual Care ObsCare.
Parallel to all this the Healthcare Sector Group of the Enterprise Europe Network (EEN) hosted their meetings in the same venue as the HELIUM consortium on the 30th of March. Following a short presentation of the project to the Sector Group members in the morning we had the opportunity to engage in networking activities during the shared coffee and lunch breaks throughout the day.
