Innovation Centre

Encouraging Innovations and Collaboration in Healthcare

The Innovation Centre (IC) was officially opened in 2020 to support innovative ideas, translate ideas to practice, actively form partnerships, and encourage UGHE students to create and generate high-value solutions in addressing global health issues.

Objectives

To encourage and support the implementation of health innovations created by the UGHE community.
To provide a platform for students, implementers, and leaders to convene and collaborate to develop health issues.
To distribute knowledge of innovative ideas and practices.
To assist in branding and developing intellectual property rights.

We inspire our students to promote global health equity through innovations and collaboration.

Strategic Priorities

Education

The UGHE Innovation Center will provide educational programs for the UGHE community, as well as regional and international learners who are interested in promoting health equity through innovative implementations. This training may range from seminars and workshops; certificate courses to structured credit-offering programs.

Innovation and Action

Implementation is a core component of the Innovation Center. 1. Innovation Lab To promote and encourage the creation and elaboration of the best and most sustainable ideas from the UGHE community, the IC collaborates with Babson College to conduct the innovation lab. UGHE and Babson’s students create innovative solutions to address health issues in teams. A review of some of the students’ Innovation Lab projects can be found here. Information about the past hackathon can be found here.
2. Incubatio Provide support for developing ideas to actualization. The IC will utilize its network to connect our students to experts in various topics to assist their development. 3. Intellectual property In the future, the IC may support successful projects to apply for patents to protect intellectual property rights.

Research and dissemination

Strong advocacy begins with the dissemination of sound scientific evidence. The IC will disseminate its work both internally and externally through various mediums – publications, conferences, newsletters, social media, mass media, webinars, and podcasts.

Collaboration

The partnership is central to the success of innovation and entrepreneurship. The IC will continue to cultivate our current relationships with existing partners and to identify and establish key relationships with other universities, non-governmental organizations, various community-based organizations, and government sectors. Our existing key partners include Babson College, the Rwanda National Union of the Deaf, Rwanda National Task Force for Rabies, Health Builders, Butaro District Hospital, Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign, and the University of Rwanda. The IC will continue to identify partnerships, funding needs, and fundraising opportunities to further support the scope of work of IC to strengthen our sustainability and promote health equity.

What We Do

East Africa Biodesign (EAB)

UGHE Hackathon

The East Africa Biodesign (EAB) Fellowship is a 10-month program led by UGHE, the University of Rwanda, and Kenyatta University, in partnership with Mussallem Centre for Biodesign. This program trains multidisciplinary fellows to identify and address unmet healthcare needs in East Africa using the Biodesign process – a systematic approach to developing need-driven MedTech solutions.

The UGHE Hackathon is a competition designed to bring together participants to apply their knowledge, creativity and skills to solve health care problems

Learn More

Contact Us

Send an email to us at innovation_center@ughe.org and include contact details for inquiries and/or collaboration opportunities.

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Innovation Centre