Exploiting the Open Innovation Model in Assistive Technologies

The recent marriage of the fields of artificial intelligence, sensors' technology, big data and health sciences allowed the emergence of a new exciting research area called health assistive technology. With the aging population around the world and the diminishing resources for healthcare, this field is growing in importance. In United States, assistive technology now represents a market of about 60 billion dollars. In the last decade, many academic research teams worldwide addressed the issue and produced great scientific contributions to the field. However, despite the huge potential of the market, many of the research done by academic teams seems to fail to produce real useful assistive devices available for customers. This observation leads to the fundamental question of this paper: how can we improve the impact and the exploitation of research's output? In this paper, we will try to investigate this problem and propose some guidelines based on our experience. More specifically, we propose the exploitation of an adapted version of the Open Innovation Model, developed at the Harvard School of Business, as a potential avenue of solution to help addressing this important issue.