When Innovation and Entrepreneurship Enrich Healthcare Professional Training
Healthcare professionals have the ideas, but not always the (right) tools.
This quote from Professor Thomas Similowski, which concluded our previous article, continues to resonate deeply. It highlights a well-known tension in the hospital world: innovation exists everywhere, all the time—but it too often remains isolated, unspoken, or even invisible.
During seven years of immersion at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital and within the AP-HP (Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris), one conclusion became undeniable: innovation can no longer be a “side-step” in healthcare professional training. It must be an integral part of it. Not as an option, but as a core competency.
Having an idea is a good start. Knowing how to structure it, carry it forward, and, above all, add value to it is quite another. Why should innovation be an integral part of healthcare professional training?
Because we can no longer provide care without innovating. This is our conviction, which led us, for this fourth and final article in our series, to explore two complementary approaches nurtured by years of collaboration: one is academic and structuring, the University Diploma in Biological and Medical Engineering (DU GBM) at the Sorbonne University Faculty of Health, initiated over 35 years ago by Professor Alain Sezeur (Deputy Director) and currently led by Professor Adrien Six (Training Director); the other is agile and anchored in usage, driven by Aude Nyadanu, PhD, and her innovation agency, Lowpital. Two visions, one shared conviction: training is transforming.
The DU GBM: Academia at the Service of Value Creation
1. The Origins of a Unique Training Program
Created in the 1980s by Professor Alain Sezeur, the DU GBM was born out of a founding frustration. At the time, Alain Sezeur was working within a pioneering CNRS team specializing in biosilicone materials. Artificial organs had been developed and patents filed—but they were perceived as “blocking” patents by an American multinational.
I found this personally very frustrating as a young intern and chief resident. So, I created the DU GBM, because biological and medical engineering is the combination of all engineering and medicine.
Pr. Alain Sezeur, Founder and Pedagogical Director of the DU GBM
Even back then, researchers were producing major innovations—but these too often remained unexploited or stuck in the laboratory. This University Diploma was therefore designed to allow participants to build bridges between two worlds: academic research and industry.
Since then, the DU’s mission has not changed: learning how to add value to research, understanding the healthcare ecosystem, and transforming an idea into an intelligible value proposition—for an investor, an industrialist, or an institution. Forty years later, the DU has trained generations of professionals who have founded or structured the first technology transfer offices in universities, hospitals, AP-HP, INSERM, biotech startups, and even international institutions like the World Anti-Doping Agency.
For me, value creation is the ultimate purpose of research. It’s not the publications. It’s about delivering societal benefits.
Pr Alain Sezeur
Professor Adrien Six, an immunology researcher trained at the Institut Pasteur, took over responsibility for the DU in 2024. His journey perfectly illustrates the strength of the program: a former student of the DU GBM and a jury member for over ten years, he became head of the program when its sustainability was at stake. He notes with humor that he took over this responsibility “out of a sense of oblivion”!
Indeed, taking over the DU revealed both the richness and the fragility of the program: a demanding curriculum, an exceptional network of speakers, diverse and loyal audiences—but also a heavy administrative workload carried with limited resources.
A training program of this age, with this many enrollees, which still attracts just as many people despite operational difficulties—it simply must continue to exist.
Pr Adrien Six, head of the DU GBM
2. Who is it for? And why?
The DU GBM’s student body is one of its greatest strengths. Adrien identifies three distinct profiles: working professionals looking to reinvent themselves or better understand the innovation ecosystem; young researchers at the end of their PhD or in post-doc positions, considering a move into the industrial world; and engineering school and innovation master’s students taking the DU as a complementary component of their curriculum.
This represents 70 to 80 enrollees each year, with fully booked sessions and very high satisfaction rates. But beyond the numbers, it is the concrete impact that stands out.
A doctoral student who has completed this training will take a few months to find a job. A doctoral student who lacks knowledge of value creation and the various career paths can sometimes take several years!
Pr. Alain Sezeur
3. Becoming Acculturated to Innovation… and Much More!
To the question “what do participants actually learn?”, the answer is straightforward: “Participants become acculturated to the biomedical innovation ecosystem. They know how to talk about it and understand its codes and vocabulary.”
Learning how to discuss it, speaking the same language, and knowing who to contact at every step of the chain from the innovative idea to the market. However, what speakers and alumni emphasize above all is something deeper: a shift in posture.
After the DU, they know how to speak. They know part of the vocabulary. And above all, they know who to speak to. This is fundamental for anyone questioning their career path.
Pr Adrien Six
It is primarily about discovering an ecosystem. Examples of transformed career paths abound: pharmacists who became heads of medical device evaluation committees, researchers who launched technology transfer offices in major institutions, and biotech startup founders who defended their DU thesis before securing their first rounds of funding. As Julie Rachline , co-pedagogical director of the program, summarizes: “We could almost ask the opposite question: are there any major innovation projects coming out of this Paris-region ecosystem where none of the stakeholders have done the DU?” This network frequently becomes a tangible accelerator.
This vision is shared by Professor Sezeur, who campaigns for the authorization to supervise research (HDR) to formally include a certification of competence in value creation: the Allègre Law of 1999 opened this path by formally establishing innovation as one of the core missions of research professors—it is high time to bring it fully to life.
The LallianSe Perspective:
LallianSe – Life Sciences Integrator has been a partner of the DU GBM for three years, and Julie Rachline serves as its co-pedagogical director. This is not just a label: it represents real involvement in designing content, leading sessions, providing a strategic outlook on the program’s evolution, and acting as a bridge to the field.
It means providing university organizers with insights and a vision from the non-academic side: sensing market needs, advising on how the DU can communicate better, reorganize, and identify areas for improvement.
Adrien Six, on the partnership with LallianSe
Creating a dialogue between two worlds that still speak to each other too rarely is our commitment alongside the University.
This training addresses a real, structural need: equipping healthcare professionals—among others—with the mindset, tools, and the right conversations to turn their intuitions into viable projects.
Lowpital : Instructional Design as a Lever for Transformation?
1. A Different Way of Learning
While the DU GBM provides the framework and structure, Lowpital transforms through experience. Founded by Aude Nyadanu, PhD, Lowpital is an innovation and instructional design agency that helps healthcare institutions and professionals—among others—navigate their transformations.
Our interactions with Aude go back several years, notably through the Challenge Innovation, where she brought her Design Thinking expertise to the heart of the application process. We asked her for her definition of Design Thinking, which is far from being a concept reserved only for experts:
Design thinking consists of approaching challenges creatively and iteratively, focusing on the real needs of users and encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration. It is theoretical common sense.
Aude Nyadanu, founder of Lowpital
The heart of the method does not lie in the tools—but in the posture. And this applies to the least glamorous, yet most frequently neglected step: the needs assessment.
Just change your paradigm: stop looking for solutions among experts based on what you already know, and truly go out into the field to understand the needs. That is the core of the approach.
Aude Nyadanu
She uses a highly evocative image: “If you have a machine, you don’t just want to know if it works or doesn’t work. You want to know what the gears look like inside, and why they sometimes get jammed; otherwise, you can never fix the machine.” This metaphor resonates strongly within a hospital system where dysfunctions are frequently identified but rarely fully understood.
2. What This Changes in the Healthcare Professional’s Posture
Healthcare managers are among Lowpital’s key audiences: “They already inherently possess my three keywords—empathy, humility, and rigor.” What Lowpital offers is a transformation in their relationship with their own power to act.
An example: Anne, a healthcare manager in infectious diseases, initially created a clever device to encourage handwashing using a musical experience and a motion sensor cobbled together from a Halloween prop. A year later, she was setting up an entire vaccination center.
This dynamic also impacts teams as a whole. At the Groupe hospitalier Nord-Essonne (GHNE), a team working on waste sorting in the operating room thought the topic was too complex for them. By breaking the problem down into multiple sub-problems and prioritizing them, they started by improving the color-coding of waste bags, making real headway on the main challenge. A small action, but a huge mental breakthrough! It is about giving healthcare professionals the power and energy to execute and take action.
The impacts extend beyond the individual scale. As Vincent Delivet, Director General of CH Annecy Genevois (a Lowpital client), explicitly put it: since this experiential transformation, staff members come to management no longer with problems, but with projects and requests for support!
3. The Challenges Innovation with LallianSe and the GHU AP-HP Sorbonne Université
Lowpital stepped in on several occasions during the Challenge Innovation cycles. The objective: utilize design thinking methodology to challenge and strengthen the applications of healthcare project leaders, ensuring they addressed real needs on the ground.
Learning by doing, along with empowering everyone to act, transforms one’s relationship with work and innovation, enabling healthcare professionals to become active drivers of their daily routines. Beyond offering a space for development, it is essential to add a fundamental condition for success: project leaders must have the space to experiment, the right to make mistakes, and the institutional backing to see things through. Without this, even the best intentions turn into frustration. Healthcare professional training must therefore be perceived and encouraged from a 360-degree perspective.
The LallianSe Perspective
Lowpital and LallianSe share a founding conviction: do not bring ready-made solutions, but create the conditions so that healthcare professionals and innovators can become the authors of their own transformations.
What we built together in the Challenge Innovation is a hybrid model: the methodological rigor of instructional design, fueled by field knowledge of the hospital, and amplified by our network of healthcare innovation stakeholders. Each edition proved that this mix works.
Perspective : Training is Equipping Those Who Run the System
The DU GBM and Lowpital represent two different approaches, yet they share the exact same conviction. One structures thought, provides vocabulary, and builds a network. The other anchors practice in reality, unleashes initiative, and transforms postures. Together, they outline what any health innovation training should be: demanding yet accessible, theoretical yet pragmatic, individual yet collective.
What these two approaches reveal is a fundamental shift: moving from a posture of an executor to that of an actor. Moving from a professional who undergoes reforms to one who imagines them. From a healthcare worker who observes dysfunctions to one who addresses them—with method, a network, and the words to convince.
Because that is also where a quiet but decisive transformation takes place: learning to speak the language of business. Knowing how to write a business plan, understanding user experience (UX), and mastering the basics of intellectual property are all indispensable skills for being taken seriously by decision-makers.
Thomas Similowski spoke in our last article about the need to “learn to unlearn.” These training programs are a concrete illustration of this: they invite professionals to question their certainties, approach problems differently, and accept iteration as a method and a learning process rather than a failure.
And what if real change started there? Not by waiting for the system to transform from the outside, but by equipping those who run it so they can drive the movement themselves?
Training to care is no longer enough.
We must now train to transform.
We must accept to take ownership of it, moving from a passive stance to a proactive posture. This is, ultimately, the core message of this article—and the common thread running through our seven years of immersion.
- Hospital Immersion Series – Article #4
Training to Transform? When Innovation and Entrepreneurship Enrich Healthcare Professional Training Healthcare professionals have the ideas, but not always the (right) tools. This quote from Professor Thomas Similowski, which concluded our previous article, continues to resonate deeply. It highlights a …
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- Hospital Immersion Series – Article #3
Hospital Innovation:Why Healthcare Professionals Must Be at the Heart of Change After three initial articles dedicated to our immersion at La Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital — exploring the origins of the Innovation Challenges and sharing the stories of projects led by award …
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- Hospital Immersion Series – Article #2bis
When healthcare professionals’ ideas become concrete solutions: a comparative look at Pikidou and T-OUT & Romain Gombert (Craft & Care). Because they are closest to patients, their practices, and their needs, healthcare professionals’ ideas and insights have immense innovative potential …
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