During the last AAL Forum held in Aarhus (Denmark) in September, 3 partners from the DAPAS project, Ana Luísa Jegundo (Project Manager, Innovation Department, Cáritas Coimbra), MSc Simone Stückler (Project Manager, exthex GmbH) and Iñaki Bartolome (CEO, Ideable) discussed about the strengths and weaknesses of AAL projects with particular attention paid to their commercial success and why they might not be attracting investment or clients in the form of public administrators, telecare and home care agencies for example. The first 15 minutes of the workshop were crucial to gain the interest of the audience that pinged the discussion with several questions, which leads us to conclude that 45 minutes for this topic was short. Some conclusions that appeared:
- We need to solve real problems and needs from real potential clients. So we need to connect to those needs, make them public and then create projects and products to solve them. Now projects come from research companies that maybe did not detect any previous need in the market.
- At the end of the projects, some support is missing to keep the solutions attractive for the clients and competitive for the public and private investors. The projects should finish with a product closer to production to avoid the gap between the end of the project and the commercialization.
