Learning in a Belgian Hospital: Conditions of biomedical innovation in the Sector of Health Sciences at the Université catholique de Louvain.

__INTRODUCTION __

This report is part of “Medlearn”. Medlearn is a research project coordinated by Prof. E. MONTPETIT (Université de Montréal, Canada), in collaboration with Prof. D. AUBIN (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium) and Prof. M. ATKINSON (University of Saskatchewan, Canada). Academic Medical Centers (AMCs) are often at the center of biomedical innovation. The objective of this research project is to better understand the conditions of biomedical innovation within AMCs, that is the capacity of diversified actors to work together behind biomedical research. An AMC is composed of a hospital and a faculty of medicine, both depending of an university. For this reason, an AMC has three missions: It provides not only health care services, but also education and research in the field of biomedicine.
To meet its objective, Medlearn is composed of two steps. The first step is devoted to qualitative case studies of three AMCs, respectively located in North-America, Europe, and Asia. They aim at familiarising the researchers with the nature of biomedical innovation and with the actor networks who support it in such organizations. The second step of Medlearn consists in a quantitative study of a more extended number of AMCs on the same three continents. It aims at testing the competing hypotheses retrieved from theories and on the basis of the case studies.