From Idea to Impact: Building Successful Digital Health Collaboration Projects

Course Introduction

This course supports regional innovation actors in developing competitive, high-impact EU project proposals in the field of digital health and interregional collaboration. The first five modules teach generic, reusable project development skills for complex European cooperation projects; the final module applies these skills to digital health programmes, regulatory context and ecosystem dynamics.

Target audience

Beginning and intermediate project developers, business developers, innovation managers, regional development agencies, universities, living labs, care organisations, SMEs, scale-ups, healthcare innovation ecosystems, and public-sector stakeholders who want to participate in or develop European collaborative projects.

Final learner output

By the end of the course, learners will have built a one-page proposal starter for their own project idea. The one-pager includes a concise problem statement, intended change, funding fit, initial consortium logic, stakeholder map, budget-to-work-package outline and readiness check.

Indicative course duration

Approximately 6-7 hours including videos, reading, knowledge checks, reflection prompts and one-pager builder assignments.

Learning outcomes

1. Screen European, interregional and regional funding opportunities and explain why a call or programme is a good or poor fit for a project idea.
2. Turn a rough idea into a structured concept note using intervention logic: problem, objectives, activities, outputs, results, outcomes, impact and KPIs.
3. Assess whether an idea is original, relevant and demanded by stakeholders rather than merely interesting to the initiator.
4. Develop a stakeholder and consortium map that shows who is needed, which roles are missing, and how partners contribute to delivery and scaling.
5. Build a first budget-to-work-package logic, including main funding, co-financing, partner contributions, state aid/GBER awareness and risk mitigation.
6. Plan a realistic proposal development process including milestones, partner commitment, quality review, submission readiness and feedback loops.
7. Apply the generic project development process to digital health, including Horizon Europe Cluster 1, Digital Europe, EU4Health and Interreg-style transnational cooperation.