A methodology for the development of innovation clusters: application in the healthcare sector.

Summary For more than 10 years, the French State and administrative regions have pursued economic development policies that stimulate all forms of innovation and encourage strategic market alliances of the economic stakeholders of a region. These “cluster” policies aim to create ecosystems that are conducive to innovation and promote the emergence of collaborative organizations. Among these innovation clusters, we are concerned with those in the health care field pertaining to aging and autonomy. Business models and action plans for these collaborative organizations are neither easy to define nor easy to stabilize and reinforce, because of the diversity of stakeholders with multiple expectations involved. This paper presents an application of the FAcT-Mirror method in the Sol’iage innovation cluster during its development stage. We demonstrate that the FAcT-Mirror method is particularly efficient and effective during the process of transformation from the emerging stage (stage of intention) to the development stage (stage of action) for a health care cluster to collectively produce common tools (definitions, strategy, working groups, and action plans).