I-Corps EAGER: CIMIT/B-BIC Regional Healthcare I-Corps Hub Proposal

Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston MA

Investigators

Abstract

The Consortia for Improving Medicine with Innovation & Technology (CIMIT) is a consortium of greater Boston's premier clinical, research and academic institutions. It is headquartered administratively at Massachusetts General Hospital and involves an ever-growing network of collaborators and affiliates. It is also a core member of the Boston BioMedical Innovation Center (B-BIC). The CIMIT/B-BIC Regional Healthcare I-Corps Hub (the "Hub") is a unique resource for the perennial community of healthcare innovators and innovations emerging from across New England's many world-class academic medical centers and institutions. The Hub will provide critical innovation-related skills development for teams of healthcare innovators through the facilitated experiential learning "Customer Development" curriculum that is used to support NSF I-Corps teams. The Hub will take advantage of the B-BIC program and effectively leverage the area's resources, since it will be based at the Consortia for Improving Medicine with Innovation and Technology (CIMIT). CIMIT is a consortium of greater Boston's premier clinical, research and academic institutions with a growing network of collaborators and affiliates, housed administratively at Massachusetts General Hospital and is a core member of B-BIC. It is a "living lab" of healthcare innovation with the mission to improve patient care by facilitating collaboration among clinicians, scientists, and engineers along with entrepreneurs and companies. The goal of the Hub is to address important unmet clinical needs and focus on building innovation capacity at its member institutions; while rapidly developing and implementing innovative products, services, procedures and workflows. The proposed Hub will make important contributions to the area's healthcare and biomedical ecosystem, while also greatly benefiting from it. The Hub will amplify CIMIT and B-BIC's resources and help fill the gaps between the area's existing healthcare innovation resources; stemming from the teams working on basic science to the area's strong collection of small and medium enterprises, as well as multi-nationals. It will draw teams of innovators from the ecosystem and, in return, provide a source of innovative teams with higher chances of commercial success for funding and support. It is expected that the Hub will make many contributions to NSF's network of Regional I-Corps Hubs, while also learning from the other industries and NIN experiences in different regions of the nation.