Pedro Oliveira: User Innovation in Healthcare

Welcome to our new series inspired by the work of Eric Von Hippel. This series is sponsored by our friends at Wazoku. Wazoku are pioneers of total innovation, transforming how organizations solve challenges, drive growth, and deliver measurable results as the world's only networked innovation marketplace, Wazoku connects people, ideas, and technology to create scalable, impactful innovation. And you can find Wazoku at wazoku.

com. In today's episode, we focus on fascinating research on user innovation and more specifically on the role of patients, caregivers, in the development of new medical products and services. We are joined by the founder and president of patient innovation. He has many, many decorations to his name that I'm not going to go through today. You can look them up online. We welcome to the show.

Professor Pedro Oliveira. Welcome to the show. Thank you. That was a very good pronunciation, by the way. So I was practicing man. I was practicing I was forcing my practice on top of Pedro off air beforehand. And I got there in the end. Great to have you with us, It's very nice to be on your show. Thank you for inviting me. We have so much to share. You have some amazing examples of patient or caregiver.

user generated innovations but i thought we'd start through the lens of what we've done before with your friend eric von Hippel with the previous guest on the show, and eric's main concept of user innovation paradigm because in a way it's like lenses through which you see your work, i thought what we do is i throw up on the screen the diagram that we've covered eric before.

But i'd love your take on that and then we'll take our audience through some examples that you've discovered through your platform. Again. Thank you for so much for having me in your show. As you just mentioned, the work of Eric von Hippel has been a big influence on my own work. His work is very influential anyway, he has created a big community of people that actually work in this area of open and user innovation and even created a society that is entitled the Open and User Innovation Society.

And what you see there is basically a good summary of some of the things that Eric and some colleagues have, published about. You see there that, in fact, Prior to user and open innovation, we had this notion of producer innovation, which is basically when companies develop new products, new services with objective of bringing them to market, with objective of commercializing, of making Profits out of those innovations. And that's one of the arrows that you see there.

On top of that, you see the red arrow, which is the one that represents user innovation. And the goal here is that in fact, if you look at the, you know, there's a timeline, right, quite often, in fact, before producers bring new products to Users did it already. You know, they don't necessarily bring the products to markets because that's not what motivates them.

But because users are motivated by the fact that sometimes they have strong needs and they need to fix those needs, they end up, , developing new devices, new solutions that they eventually bring to market as well. In fact, we were inspired by these. And at some point in our research, we start looking at the field of healthcare. We were very intrigued because we start finding the patients that in some cases actually managed to save their lives. And this was obviously very powerful.

Let me give you an example.

I was very, very intrigued when we bump into Tal Golesworthy. Tal Golesworthy is a guy from England. He's an engineer that at some point was told by his doctor. that due to his Marfan syndrome condition, so he's a Marfan syndrome patient, he was at risk of dying. And the risk here was that his water was at risk of having a rupture and this eventually would kill him. And the doctor was actually not very nice in terms of giving him, a good forecast.

He told him, look, we anticipate that this could even happen within 24 months. Long story short, Tal went on thinking about his own problem and realized that, wow, maybe I could come up with a solution because if I have a pipe, right? Of course, I'm talking about his award, but for an engineer, it was just a pipe, that is going to have a rupture. I just don't wait for this to happen. I try to do something about it.

And long story short, actually, there was worth it managed to develop an awarding support to put around his own award. Well, not just to save his life, but in fact, over 1000. Patients have received the same awarding support that was developed by this guy.

And, we were inspired by people like him or Louis Plante. Louis Plante has a different situation. Louis was sadly, he passed away already, was a cystic fibrosis patient. Among many other complications. These patients have these mucus that accumulate in the lungs. And part of the problem is that this can create infections that sometimes actually kill the patients. This is still a fatal disease. And of course, we knew this very well.

We suffered a lot as a kid because he had to do all the traditional treatments. And by the way, he was lucky in a way. Because for a long time, the life expectancy for these patients was five years. Five years meaning, kids would not grow into adulthood. They would die on average age of five. And , what was the solution?

Because there was this mucus that accumulated in the lungs, What people have, developed the solutions were things like chest clapping, both in the front and also in the, back to try to remove the mucus from the lungs. In fact, doctors, call it the so called ketchup bottle principle. I mean, think about this, right? I mean, if we have ketchup and if we need to take it out, what we do is that we clap it as well. So that's what we did to kids for a long, long time, right?

Doing all this clapping and then turning kids upside down, shaking them so that the mucus would come out. And of course this was not very efficient as you can imagine. So some patients, and I've talked with many, , would describe this as excruciating because if you're doing all these treatments was really bad, , Louis had to do four hours of treatment per day, which basically means having his mother, for instance, or his caregiver.

doing the chest clapping and sometimes his body was hurting already because, they were ill. . So this was really difficult for the patients. And what happened one day to Louis was very intriguing to him. One day he went to a concert and what happened in that concert changed his life , it was classical music and he was sitting there.

And of course, when you go to a concert the expectation is that you remain silent, but he couldn't , he was feeling very uncomfortable during the concert, and the music was causing this discomfort. What was happening was that the vibrations from the music were shaking , his lungs. And of course this was causing a lot of discomfort. He was coughing most of the time, people around him were giving him these weird looks like, come on, it's a concert. You should remain silent.

He didn't leave during this first half of the concert and to everyone's surprise during the break, he was fine. So of course there was no music. That was even worse, right? Because the people around him were really irritated. You know, this was the guy that was coughing most of the time. And now during the break, he was fine. But the second part was a different endement. It was Shostakovich. Boom, boom. The music was A bit violent for him.

And in fact, he was sitting there feeling very uncomfortable. And at some point he had to leave the concert and this crisis of spectoration at the door of the concert hall, and went home afterwards thinking about it, right? Why did it happen? And he realized that of course it was the vibration from the music. And he went down thinking that. Well, of course, in a concert hall, like he had experienced, this was a bad thing, but maybe if he could control it, this could work.

And he went home and start experimenting with speakers. So we would , use speakers that you would put in front of his lungs so that you would get the vibrations from the music and it could even control the music. And it was very interesting because, I realized that it's not really the music that works. The best, the best would be boom, boom. And of course it wasn't necessarily pleasant to listen to that.

He realized that if you could remove the music and just leave some strong vibrations, this would be the best to clear the lungs. , we plan to develop the Frequencer, which is a machine that many of these patients use. And when they want to clear the lungs, And I've seen patients doing this in my own office, at some point, for instance, did, that with me. He asked me if he could put the thing in front of his legs, which he did. And for maybe 15, 20 minutes.

We were talking and I could hear his voice and of course there was a bit of vibration in his voice because he was getting the vibration in the lungs. But, afterwards he asked for the toilets and I think he obviously did his pectoration. And he did the treatment as he was there, to me. And of course this was remarkable because it was again a solution that was developed by a patient.

And I could go on because in fact, what we realized at some point was that there were many patients like this out there when I say many and, you know, I'm sure there's even more. It was very interesting because at some point we realized that maybe we could try to collect some of these.

And what we did was to develop an online platform, and then we invited patient innovators, as we call them, patients that actually develop innovative devices for themselves, not necessarily with objective of bringing them to market, even if sometimes that's what's happening, that's what happens, but with objective of using them in the very first place. And, you know, we start getting all sorts of solutions.

So we had to invite a team of medical doctors to help us in the assessment of the solutions because we were also getting a lot of crazy stuff. But now we have a big portfolio of solutions like these that we share. Sometimes we even help them to actually commercialize, the solutions that bring them to market. So among other things, what we did was we actually started an award, what we call the patient innovation award . And this is something we have done in Lisbon several times.

We also did it in Paris. We did it in Copenhagen, in Denmark. So the goal is to Invite people from all over the world to submit what they have and see what are some of the most influential solutions that these guys have developed. And some of these solutions are remarkable. And you know, what we do then is we created this award to of course, recognize them for the impact that I, that they are having. Let me give you an example.

For instance this past year in 2024, we did another edition of our patient innovation award.

And one of the technologies that got an award is truly remarkable. This is something that was developed in Denmark by a guy, his name is Hans. Hans is. almost blind. It's not totally blind, but he can see some light and that's about it. Well, it's hard for us to even understand how difficult it is. The life of someone that doesn't see. But of course, for someone with this condition things at home, simple things like choosing what is the right can that you want to open, right?

You have a tomato juice and the soup and the only one is the one that you want to open and you have no clue which one is the one that you are looking for. And , because he wanted to be as independent as possible, he at some point start realizing that His camera in the iPhone could really help him because with the camera he could do a video call and you know of course I could do this with you, right? If I needed help.

Look, I'm here trying to figure out which one is the right can, can you help me? And you tell me, hey Pedro, I think if you want the tomato juice, go for the one at the right. And I would say, Hey, okay, thank you so much. That's really helpful. And, of course, I mean Hans was doing this , well, in the beginning with some of his friends, and then he starts realizing, well, poor people, right?

I'm always calling the same group of people, and this could be much more interesting if, in fact, On one side, if I could find a pool of volunteers that could help people that have these sort of needs. And what he did was truly remarkable because in fact, he created this app that people can use. I use it a lot. I'm opening it.

And as of now, as of, as we speak, in fact, there are over 8, 500, 000 volunteers in the website, in the app that have helped more than 786, 000 people that are either blind or have low vision or some sort of eye condition. So of course that's millions of people helping, almost a million people, right? Or at different points, at least these people have asked for help. But this is not the end of the story. Think about it. This guy is amazing by the way.

So as you can imagine, starting a new project, starting a firm is extremely hard. We can just imagine how hard it is for someone that is almost blind. He did it in Denmark and of course he was very happy when he realized that he had already more volunteers than the population. Of his country, which is again, truly remarkable.

And then at some point you realize that, sometimes rather than calling a person, which could be, of course, not the best thing to do, if you are at home, your house is very disorganized and , you don't necessarily want to call a person, right? Maybe AI can help and think about it, right? AI can help because AI can clearly describe what's in front of me. And the, what basically, so this project is called Be My Eyes.

And basically now, one option that the patients have is to, rather than calling a person, of course, this is still there, this option. There are still, as I just mentioned, over 8 million people that are willing to help. But AI can eventually help describing what these guys cannot see. And some of the use cases, obviously you haven't seen them.

I really encourage you to have a look because it's truly amazing what what I've seen some blind people doing, for instance, navigating in London, of course, sightseeing speaking right where AI is describing everything. And at some point, for instance one of these guys wants to get the taxi and there's a lot of traffic. And the AI, AI, AI. The app that was developed for them by OpenAI is one of the best use cases that I've seen, in fact, of OpenAI technology.

There's a lot of cars passing by and basically the app tells him, look, if you want to get a taxi, I will tell you when you should hail. And there's a, this is a blind guy, right? With a camera in front of him with his phone. But the phone tells him, please hail. And the taxi stops in front of him. But this is even not the end of the story, because if you think about it, of course, for all of us, it wouldn't make much sense. If you want to see to, to use a cell phone in front of us, right?

We have eyes. And even if they cannot use them in the same way that we do, they have eyes too. What basically they realize is that they could use glasses. And now, Ray Ban has developed some glasses for them that have cameras, small cameras in fact, that have also speakers that tell them, it's again, AI, right? They look very nice, in fact. And as they navigate, in the streets of any city or at home the technology is describing them what is going on.

So the main point is, of course, AI is changing everything, but what AI is also doing for patient innovators, for user entrepreneurs, for, user innovators in general, in particular in healthcare is, truly remarkable because all of us now, of course, can have the help of the technology that can really change lives. And what we have observed is that this is happening. In fact, we have introduced AI models in our training and some of these patient innovators, and this is truly remarkable.

How the solutions that we are now getting are so much better already. Because of course, of course it can help you and me. So of course it can also help people that have some sort of disadvantage because there's something there that is willing to help you. That's what we are observing. Incredible, incredible. This all started out of curiosity by you and studying this work. And then you built a platform and it's a, an organization. Not a for profit organization that you essentially run, but

You enable, profitability by bringing in, it's a multi sided platform, so therefore. Industry can get involved let's share a little bit about that how it's multi sided platform so who are the sides of the Yeah. Much of so when we started, we were just focusing on freely sharing what we have, meaning, you know, everything that we were finding or that people could actually submit to the platform was freely shared online. And still the majority of what we have in the site is being freely shared.

Then what we realized was that, sometimes the patient, The innovator doesn't necessarily want to do that. In some cases, for instance, they wanted to become entrepreneurs. They wanted to be the ones that wanted to further develop what they have and bring that to market. When we realized that, we created a second option for these patients. So we created these, we were very lucky to start with, because we got a grant from EIT ELF, which is a large European organization.

It stands for European Institute of Technology, and then they work in several areas, ELF is one of them. And it's in fact a big consortium of almost 300 healthcare organizations. And they gave us a bit of money to help these patients develop what they have. , what we did was a bootcamp that basically brings some of these patient innovators to Lisbon and then to Barcelona, to IESE in Barcelona.

So in Lisbon, they work with my own school, Nova School of Business and Economics, as well as with the Nova Medical School. Then they moved to Barcelona where they will focus more on issues of business plan development. They work at the IESE Business School in Spain. And finally, they go to Copenhagen Business School in Copenhagen in Denmark. In this program, we help them further develop what they have. First, we select them, people have to apply.

We select them, we then fund them, they get a small grant to travel to these places, etc. The program is free. And this is for those that want to actually further develop what they have and bring what they have to market. As you can imagine, this is not always possible, right? We are talking about a very unusual type of entrepreneur, right? We are talking about patients.

And of course, sometimes, these patients are afflicted with serious diseases and it's not their priority to bring solutions to market or to further develop them, or they can't, even if they want it. So we have, apart from these two solutions, the ones that I already described, right? On one side, helping them freely sharing what they have. On the other side, the second option is to help them with this bootcamp.

The third option is to help them matching with eventually companies that want to further develop what they have and bring that to market. And we help in the matching process. So basically what we realize is that we could create a space where companies could come and we would showcase what we have in the site, because in fact, What we have in our collection includes stuff that can be shared, freely shared because our team of doctors went through it and thought it was not dangerous.

And also the innovator is willing to share. Sometimes that's what they want to do, right? Because many of these patients, they are not really interested in making any money out of these. What they want is to have others use what they did, et cetera. But it's true that there is another group of people that would like to eventually benefit financially. From what they have eventually licensed these to an existing company.

So we created this space where we show case to those that, want to have a look basically, and this is typically companies, , met their companies. Digital tech companies and we show them what we have some of the things that in fact are freely shared But then other things that somehow we can't yet really share and the and when the patients are willing to allow us to share with the potential buyers. We do that.

And we have examples of products that are now in the process of becoming, available in the market that were initially developed by by patients. In fact, we already have products like these, sometimes best selling products, Medtronic has a device. For instance, this was, if we look at the history and that's why the work by Eric von Hippel is so rich, so important because basically he was saying this a while ago and what we realize is that it's the way it works.

For instance, in this case, we know that the work that is now sometimes being commercialized by some companies was originally developed by patients. This device by Medtronic is one of those cases. We even know who the person was, in fact, , people know about this, I talk about this case sometimes. The power of users, the power of patients is enormous.

I think it's even now much bigger than it was before because of course there are all these tools that can help the patients to further develop what they have. And that's what our mission is to. Help these patients further developing the solutions and increasing the impact that these solutions can have on everyone's life.

Pain for people of the worry about the ip and how do i do this how do i find this how do i find the right company etc We have beautiful examples and there's so so many more are gonna link in the show notes to pedro's ted talks there's articles out there as well eric also eric van hippel talks about pedro in his work as well eric's also gonna come back on the show and unpack some of this and, link it into his own work as well.

Pedro for people who want to find out more about the platform who may be patients or carers who have an idea themselves and they want to bring it to you or bring to the platform to find people, where can i find the platform and find out your work We are in different social media. If they search for patient innovation of course they will find this. They can find some of my colleagues working in universities in Portugal, in Denmark, in Spain, in the US. They can just get in touch.

I'm sure people will be happy to respond to questions and to provide the support. And of course, we also keep inviting people , to help us spread the word. On one side, we think that, 5, 000 innovations, which is more or less what we have in the site right now is a lot, and it is a lot, right? Innovation is rare, and having 5, 000 medical devices or, services that were self developed by patients is obviously a lot.

But we know that there is a lot more out there because, of course, when someone innovates for himself in his garage, in his kitchen, in his hospital bed, that person has no incentive to share. The main goal is to use. So what we want is people to be able to share that. So if you have heard of stories like this, please share them with us because of course we are always going after those stories with the goal of trying to further develop them if, if that makes sense at all.

And eventually sharing them so that we can maximize the impact of all these user innovations because we are talking about healthcare, we call patient innovations.

Founder and president of patient innovation, pedro Oliviera thank you for joining us. Thank you, it was a real pleasure. Another episode of this user innovation series brought to you by friends at wazoku pioneers of total innovation transforming how organizations solve challenges drive growth and deliver, measurable results. As the world's only network innovation marketplace wazoku connects people ideas and technology to create scalable impactful innovation you can discover, wazoku at www.

wazoku. com.