Designing a Business Summit: Designing Market-Driven Robotics Solutions

Space is limited to 30. Please register today.

Developed and hosted by the Tepper School of Business’s Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship and Executive Education Center and sponsored by The Technology Collaborative.

This cross-disciplinary summit brings together experts in Healthcare, robotics technology and business development. Together we will identify market opportunities and co-discover feasible robotic applications for disruptive innovation within the healthcare field. The summit will be a collaborative, hands-on design session between the technologists who develop robotics and the industry leaders that can best be served by these technologies.

Why Healthcare
The healthcare industry struggles from the combined pressure of skyrocketing costs, aging populations in industrialized countries, and a shortage of qualified workers, as well as the need to continuously improve the quality of services and results. For every challenge faced by the healthcare community, however, there are multiple opportunities to develop innovation solutions that benefit business professionals, academicians, and investors. Robotics and automation technology–healthcare robotics–are on class of solution.

Robotics has become routine in the world of manufacturing and other repetitive labor. While industrial robots were developed primarily to automate dirty, dull and dangerous tasks, medical and healthcare robotics are designed for entirely different environments and activities–those that involve direct interaction with human users in the surgical theater, the medical and rehabilitation center, and the family room.

What do we mean by robotics?
Definitions of what constitutes a robot vary. However, there is a general consensus as to the essential characteristics that a robot must possess. Loosely categorized, robots will be able to sense, think, and act:
Sensors - Robots employ sensing technology to acquire information about their environment.
Intelligence - Robots process information captured through sensor technology and produce outputs for decision-making, coordination, and control.
Motion - Robots automatically follow instructions that are pre-programmed, or generated in real-time based on sensor input, to perform deliberate, controlled and often repeated, mechatronic actions.

The Summit at a Glance
The summit will begin with presentations on disruptive innovation, robotics technology and the role of design. Following, attendees will break into small teams and use a facilitated, design-driven process to uncover opportunities within the healthcare domains and develop them into market-driven solutions. Each member of your six-person team is specifically chosen to provide the expertise needed to support the process of designing feasible, viable, and desirable solutions. You will work alongside industry, robotic technology and business development experts. The process will be guided by leading experts in design facilitation.

A Design-Driven Process
Attendees will work collaboratively over three key stages. To begin, teams will discover and synthesize the key needs, trends, activities, and challenges within the various healthcare domains. These insights will then be framed or mapped into opportunity areas. These visualizations allow teams to construct a model of the industry’s ecosystem and show a consolidated view of the goals and actions within this space. Teams then follow by developing a wide range of concepts that respond to their opportunity framework. And finally, a small number of concepts will be refined and applied to a real-world context. They will develop a “scenario” that includes the robotic technology; the opportunity it addresses; how it is a disruptive innovation; and its potential business model. At the end of key stages teams will deliver short presentations to share insights and ideas with the summit at-large.

Facilitation
Design facilitation will led by the design consultancy and technology research lab, MAYA Design and the innovation consulting firm, Gravity Tank.

Keynotes
Information coming soon. Please check back.

For a complete overview of the summit including goals, process, and outcomes, please read “Design a Business Summit”.