Pedro Oliveira (academic)

Pedro Oliveira (born, December 3, 1971 in Bangui, Central African Republic) is an innovation scholar, professor of Technology and Innovation Management at Católica Lisbon School of Business & Economics in Lisbon, Portugal.^[1] Pedro was an International Faculty Fellow at MIT Sloan School of Management, where he worked with his mentor Prof. Eric von Hippel.

He is the founder and project leader of Patient Innovation,^[2] a platform that brings together patients and caregivers to share innovation solutions developed by themselves to help them cope with their disease. His initiative goes further recognizing that patients and caregivers are innovators in their own right and Pedro became an advocate for patients' right to innovation.^[3][4][5][6]

His initiative has received the support from patients and patient associations from around the globe, notable scientists such as Prof. Robert Langer, or Nobel Laureates Prof. Aaron Ciechanover and Sir Richard J. Roberts. In a recent interview to HuffingtonPost, Roberts said about Pedro Oliveira:^[7] "I first heard of Patient Innovation as a result of my meeting a Portuguese man Pedro Oliveira, who is a very impressive guy. He introduced me to a local journalist in Lisbon and a few of their friends including a doctor and some others including academics from the Sloan School at MIT. They had noticed that there were quite a few non-medical people who were doing really innovative stuff in healthcare to make lives easier for people with handicaps, or with serious medical conditions. Many of these things were so different from anything a doctor would have ever said that they thought that it would be good if they could put together some kind of network where people who came up with these kind of ideas could advertise them and could share them with other patients who might benefit. I thought that was just a great idea, especially since I love this sort of maverick approach to medicine or science or anything else".

In a recent speech, European Commissionner Carlos Moedas made the following remarks ^[8]"I think what you've achieved is nothing less than astonishing! The simplest innovations are the game-changers. And game-changing innovation doesn't always come easily to a sacred profession like medicine. Not many people are willing to put in the effort it takes to prove something can be done differently. Particularly, when the world around you seems to think that 'the way it's always been done' is probably good enough. So I congratulate you − I respect you immensely − for being the pro-wrestlers of change! The heavy-weights of patient innovation! I can't wait to see what the future has in store for this project and its impacts on citizens!"

In December 2014, he was named (by Jornal i, a Portuguese newspaper) as “one of the 14 Portuguese citizens who contributed to change the world for the better”^[9][10] due his work on the Patient Innovation Project.

On 14 January 2016 he was distinguished, together with Daniel Traça, Dean of Nova SBE, as "Personality of the Year in Education in Portugal" and received an Amadeus Brighter Award.^[11]

He was also co-founder of the leading crowdfunding platform in Portugal (PPL Crowdfunding Portugal).

Major contribution: Innovation by patients

He is best known for his work in the notion of patient innovation.^[12][13][14] He found that patients of chronic diseases frequently develop valuable solutions to improve their quality of life and treat their diseases, something saving their own lives. These innovations usually occur behind closed doors and might never be know or used by someone else. However, if successful innovations were shared with other patients and caregivers with similar needs, they could improve the lives of many other. In a period of about 18 months, his online platform shared about 400 innovations developed by patients or caregivers.

References