The ODIN Ecosystem aims to bring together important stakeholders in the context of the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and Robotics in hospitals. Its objective is to attract innovation and open collaboration with the best talents in the field for collaboratively solving challenges in hospital settings. An open approach is a precondition to be able to create such innovative services or products.

ODIN aims to be a connection point with the entrepreneurial world in an environment designed for co-creation, and where highly qualified researchers work. The main idea is to collaboratively move towards future with a focus on the goal of being a smart hospital reference by promoting innovation and entrepreneurship throughout the entire health value chain. 

The ODIN Ecosystem is one out of three pillars for market uptake – besides transforming pilots into standardised services into the ODIN catalogue and generating awareness about the value of the ODIN platform. After having defined the core Ecosystem consisting of the ODIN consortium, the next steps are to consolidate it through long-term partnerships and alignments and finally to foster its growing and thus, to expand the ecosystem.

To create new products or service innovation within an ecosystem setting, the environment requires openness. Ecosystem participants have varying knowledge, resources, and interests in the innovations. They can be part of the process in one or several aspects. Additionally, teamwork and innovation systems provided by management play an important role in successful networks – as it is envisioned within ODIN.

Nevertheless, open innovation within a business ecosystem also has its challenges, due to the nature of interdisciplinarity and collaboration of different (also enterprise) cultures. They might use different terminology and have different expectations. In addition, trust and ownership are sensitive topics which play a crucial part when it comes to openness in the ecosystem.

One of the major objectives of ODIN is to foster innovation, transformation and disruption. It wants to enlarge its own ecosystem by addressing start-ups, SMEs, industry, technology centres, universities, and technical professionals to collaborate on more efficient and sustainable solutions for smart hospitals. 

An Open Innovation Hub is put into place in order to facilitate interaction and to co-create new value by combining state-of-the-art core technologies developed by ODIN based on its expertise on smart hospitals and ongoing projects with other needs and ideas. These are supposed to contribute to the creation of a better healthcare delivery, improving inter-professional collaboration, optimizing information flows and business models, and implementing effective patient-centred care pathways.

In order to foster these solutions and to enhance the approach, it is necessary to gain interest and to pool demanders and suppliers at one place: the ODIN ecosystem. During the lifetime of ODIN many different activities are initiated in order to enlarge this ecosystem and involve more stakeholders in the project to maximise impact. The Open Call and the creation of the ODIN Innovation Hub are important tools to reach this objective.