DESIGN OF PRODUCTS AND SERVICES FOR THE AUTOMATION OF CELL CULTURE IN THE PRODUCTION OF ADVANCED THERAPY MEDICINE

A cure for what until now was incurable. Tumors, arthrosis, regeneration of diseased tissues or those that have suffered a trauma. It sounds like science fiction but medicine is advancing and, thanks to the intertwining with biotechnologies, it is starting to propose innovative therapies that are proving to be effective. But. Half a million people are queuing (unfortunately constantly expanding) and even less than 1% are able to access these therapies every year. Production capacity is in fact held back by exorbitant costs, complex processes and organizational difficulties. This analysis aims to investigate the different and intertwined causes of the problem and is followed by the presentation of a project and development of a possible solution. The project involved an entire company and a Balanced Scorecard system made it possible to set up and maintain a balance in the internal dynamics between the many and various departments involved. For constant and clear internal communication, graphic and summary artifacts of Service Design such as Customer Journey Maps and Service Blueprints were used. The skills involved ranged from Business Development to regulatory different areas, from biotechnology to mechatronics and software, from communication to sales and post-market. The "Genesis" model was therefore chosen to structure and manage an Innovation Team in order to collect and filter an exhaustive map of ideas and to translate it into a Minimum Viable Product over a short period of time. The use of Design Thinking proved to be crucial and made it possible to immediately involve potential customers (consum-actors) and to empathize with their problems, deepening the search for hidden needs and allowing the formulation of solutions focused on creating real value and real benefit. The attention paid to correctly targeting business objectives has accompanied - and in some way even helped to amplify - the attention to satisfy not only the "company" customer but also the "person" customer. In fact, throughout the management of the User Experience we have tried to pay extreme attention to and leverage on "Design for All" to ensure both physical and cognitive ergonomics. The Nielsen-Norman Group's usability heuristics were used but also the stringent regulations for the usability of medical devices (despite the fact that the product is not configured as such) in order to increase the general comprehensibility of the instrument and reduce the error. human thanks to the cycle of "perception / cognition / action".