When the Patient Innovates. Emerging Practices in Service Ecosystems

Exploring the patient innovation culture is essential to design future solutions regarding service innovation in healthcare. A new family of collaborative, participatory and social, informal, independent, and experimental practices and experiences is emerging from below. Patients and their caregiving system create an emerging and pervasive phenomenon that can be identified as patient innovation. When we talk about it, we refer to a set of product, service, process, or system innovations generated by end-users. In a broader perspective, patient innovation represents the final step, perhaps the most radical or revolutionary, of a process of action and organization of individuals. The study of these bottom-up and independent innovations and innovators has been considered more concerning the research and political sphere than the strictly productive and service ones. Cure and care services are changing, incorporating inclusion, and the processes’ enhancement guaranteed by the idea of an open and distributed (access to) augmentative technology. The healthcare system needs, thus, to question its more traditional techno-scientific and organizational models. Furthermore, it includes the patient perspective into service design processes.