DRiVE-ing our project’s objectives and outputs to stakeholders: Highlights from our team’s participation to the AGE-WELL 2016 Annual General Meeting

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Collaboration, co-production, commercialization – These key themes stood out to us over many of the presentations we heard and conversations we heard at the AGE-WELL annual meeting.  We also heard about the challenges we have in Canada to translate knowledge from research into commercially viable products and processes to ultimately reach our collective AGE WELL goal of helping older Canadians maintain their independence, health and quality of life. The inspiring conversations and networking continued through our time at the Canadian Association on Gerontology’s (CAG) conference.

For those of us on the The DRiVE team, who are passionate about resolving this struggle and understand these key themes, we were energized by the discussions in Montreal at both the AGE-WELL 2016 annual general meeting, October 18th-20th and the CAG annual conference from October 20th-22nd 2016.

We were happy to be able to share our work from our first year including presentations including:

  1. Creating a Theory of Action for regional health innovation ecosystems which we believe will have an important impact on our AGE-WELL network through;

  2. HQP Heather McNeil’s ECOTECH PhD thesis on engaging older adults in Regional Health Innovation Ecosystems;

  3. Our work with CC2 on emerging Canadian innovation health and aging hubs;

  4. Our inventory and map to support our international survey looking for the factors that helped build and sustain ecosystems or innovation entities; and

  5. Results from one of our case studies- Innovation Boulevard in Surrey British Columbia.

We are especially excited by the interactions we had at the Demo and Drinks event where we were grateful to gather feedback on our work and learn of a couple of new international innovation entities in health and aging innovation. A big thank you to our team member Crystal Gill Herrera, Master’s student, for doing a wonderful job staffing our demo.

Two of the other highlights for us also involved our HQP!

  • Our soon to be joining the team PDF- Katherina Kutchel, PhD- joined us at the conference. It was wonderful to meet with her face to face and engage in productive planning and team building.

  • Congratulations to Heather McNeil, PhD student and research associate on the DRiVE team, who received the 2016 Schlegel-University of Waterloo Research Institute for Aging Scholarship by the Canadian Association for Gerontology http://cagacg.ca/awards/schlegel-ria/

We look forward to continuing the collaboration with stakeholders both within and beyond the AGE-WELL and CAG networks. As a start to this continued collaboration, please visit our interactive international innovation in health and aging entity Map.