InnovaTion in Health And Care for All
ITHACA involves 9 EU regions with a shared ambition to accelerate the scaling up of smart health and care innovation that can support active and healthy living and secure the triple win of economic growth, more sustainable health and care systems and improved well-being of Europe’s citizens.  Focusing on this sphere, its primary goal is to improve Structural Funds’ policies and implementation across the smart health and care innovation cycle (invention, co-creation, market testing, validation, scaling up) and enhance regional and interregional ecosystems. 

ITHACA recognises that effective, innovation cycle outcomes require enhanced cooperation between quadruple helix stakeholders. ITHACA will thus incorporate interregional collaboration, involving a wide range of expert stakeholders, that comprises exchange of good practices, mutual learning, peer assessment, knowledge transfer, targeted coaching and collective, co-designed policy development. It will deliver its results through interlinked project activities and outputs during 3 sequential steps: (1) Identification and Analysis; (2) Interregional Mutual Learning; (3) Knowledge Transfer and Action Planning. Steps 1 and 3 also include assessments of policy enhancement and learning performance. Wide dissemination of good practices and lessons, especially to New Member States, is central to ITHACA’s purpose.

ITHACA’s primary outputs include: 
-	ITHACA self, peer and expert assessment tools and findings focused on regions’ strengths, weaknesses, policy priorities and policy enhancements relating to all stages of the innovation cycle and ecosystems; 
-	An ITHACA Framework Strategy for developing evidence based and co-designed policies, programmes and implementation methods and for identifying how best to improve policy instruments; 
-	9 Regional Action Plans (each informed by the Framework Strategy, pre and interim self-assessments and EEPE case study) to enhance the implementation of regional policy instruments.