New initiatives will build on the success of KITE Creates, including more than 20 live events that brought together brought together scientists, leaders in creative industries and people with lived experience.
UHN’s KITE Research Institute is bringing its expertise to the rapidly growing field of high-performance, high-design, AI-enabled health technology.
Two years ago, KITE Creates was launched, with an ambitious idea: to bring together creatives, healthcare entrepreneurs, researchers, and industry in an ecosystem that would create more effective, better-designed, market-ready healthcare innovations.
Today, it boasts a remarkable track record. It has fueled 38 up-and-coming ventures through an intensive cohort program. It has brought together industry experts, scientists, and the public through 22 events. And it partnered with academic and industry partners for several collaborative initiatives. Altogether, it has reached more than 5,775 people.
At KITE Creates’ public events, industry experts, scientists and people with lived experience came together to connect, share their wins, and co-create a vision for the future of healthcare, design, fashion and creative technologies. “We connected scientists, health entrepreneurs and innovators around topics that truly resonated, sparking ideas, partnerships, and conversations that continued well beyond the stage,” says Helen Weston, textiles specialist and programming lead for KITE Creates.
At the same time, participants in the KITE Creates cohort program benefitted from boutique guidance on branding, IP, product testing, and more, all while developing stronger networks and receiving invaluable support from peers in the group.
“The KITE Creates program has opened KITE's doors to new ideas, inspiring energy and valuable collaborators,” says Garrick Ng, KITE Creates program lead. “Through our events and cohorts, we’ve successfully ‘engineered serendipity’ - helping participants encounter unexpected but helpful connections, information and perspectives about how to improve health both in clinical care and out in the community.”
Inside KITE’s innovation ecosystem
The KITE Creates initiative – which is part of UHN’s KITE Research Institute - was catalyzed through support from FedDev Ontario, the City of Toronto and UHN. Many of the ventures it has supported have successfully launched already, including inclusive career platform Enabled Talent, digital studio Invalid Symbol, fitness app Accessercise, trendy compression garments Tression, and medical performance garment company Bariatric Technologies. These companies are creating jobs, generating economic growth, and meaningfully improving their customers’ quality of life.
“KITE is proud to have played a robust role in bridging the gap between industry and research, and to contribute to economic growth in Ontario,” says KITE Institute Director Dr. Milos R. Popovic. “At KITE, we take pride in being a place where research quickly translates into real-world innovation. KITE Creates has helped us combine our own world-leading research and labs with outside expertise, supporting initiatives that will change how Canadians manage disability, aging, and illness.”
“Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to shape the future of healthcare
High-performance, high-design, AI-enabled health technology is attracting unprecedented investments and fundamentally reshaping the healthcare market.
As a recent report from the World Economic Forum and Boston Consulting Group put it: “The global health landscape is on the cusp of a significant transformation, driven by the rapid integration of digital technologies and artificial intelligence. In healthcare, medtech and pharma, an inflection point has been reached: the choice now lies between transforming systems or continuing down the road of incremental improvement. . ... [AI transformation] involves rethinking the fundamentals of how health is delivered and accessed.”
This explosive growth will unlock new and more accessible health and wellness solutions, while creating new norms for the effectiveness, accessibility and impact of everything from direct-to-consumer health wearables to clinical tools, says Ng.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Canada to become a world-leader in age-tech, wearables, digital therapeutics, creative health tech, and other emerging technologies,” he explains. “These are relatively nascent areas without clearly established leaders — areas that are ideal for Canada to incubate.”
KITE is building on the momentum of the first phase of KITE Creates by pursuing new partnerships and funding that will give UHN’s KITE Research Institute a defining role in supporting successful ventures and meaningfully shaping emerging standards and policy decisions in this new space.
“Now that we have demonstrated what can be achieved through curated programming and early-stage venture support, we are ready for KITE to play a deeper role in feeding the commercialization pipeline for promising healthcare ventures,” says Ng. “This will solidify our leadership in this space, reduce the burden on the healthcare system and taxpayers, and, most importantly, improve the health and quality of life of Canadians.”