Keywords: knowledge sharing, networking

HIV Digital is a need based innovation process to boost innovations for people living with HIV, led by Tallinn Science Park Tehnopol in cooperation with GlaxoSmithKline and the Estonian Ministry of Social Affairs. See more from: http://hivdigital.ee/en/

HIV Digital is a competition for digital health solutions that focuses on problems and needs in the area of HIV. The goal is to start a discussion about innovation opportunities in HIV, inspire disruptive innovations and support the development process from the best ideas to usable and useful solutions. Its main purpose is to bring to the market at least one new innovative solution to have a considerable impact for people living with HIV. We also aim to facilitate collaboration with all HIV stakeholders in Estonia, including patients, and testing the value based innovation process to create a new application in a chosen domain. Tallinn Science Park Tehnopol aims to achieve new startups for its incubation programme, provide a top quality service for its large client company, GlaxoSmithKline, and develop relationships with the Estonian Ministry of Social Affairs. GlaxoSmithKline aimed to get solutions that would make progress to achieve 90/90/90 goal in Estonia: 90% of people with HIV get diagnosed, 90% of diagnosed people get treatment, and 90% of those get treated so well that they do not transmit the disease further.

Science parks have been offering startup services through their incubation programmes for a long time but for multinationals, who are most attractive tenant companies, it has not been easy to offer more value. The problems we tried to overcome are that there are still too many technology push solutions vs need and value based solutions, and hackathons to start new ideas are fun events, but do not create real new international startups. HIV Digital combines different elements used in innovation to achieve long term results for all stakeholders: patient personas, service design, stakeholder involvement, deep insight into the challenges for technology and business developers, hackathon with access to the stakeholders, incubation process, grants and access to the stakeholders to validate and develop the solutions.

HIV Digital has started the dialogue between all HIV stakeholders in Estonia on how services can be improved through effective cooperation. Through patient and stakeholder interviews and a brainstorming event, we mapped the main HIV challenges in Estonia, and got 17 new innovative solutions proposed to solve them. A 48 hour hackathon with 60+ business and technology developers, designers and health care specialists resulted in 7 strong solutions, with 1st validation already during the hackathon. 4 of these were given a three month grant and accepted into the Tehnopol incubation programme. The evaluation board chose the two best ones for a further grant to develop their product for the market by summer 2017 and also the incubation service is continuing. By now, March 2017, the two new startups are in the final phase of development with their MVP and will start testing with real users in April. The products should be on the Estonian market by June 2017. From the other teams 3 have also decided to continue with the solutions. For Tehnopol it has resulted in 5 new startups and proven process to boost innovation. GlaxoSmithKline Estonia has achieved great publicity inside their global organisation.

This process can be used by many science parks around the world to achieve new innovations for their clients and new clients for themselves. It can also be used with other innovation support structures and by multinational themselves to facilitate innovation. HIV is just an example topic.