InnoStars launches a new community series
The first InnoStars Community Meeting, held on 6 October 2026, launched a new monthly series designed to share partners’ work, bring together perspectives from across the InnoStars network and open discussions to the wider health innovation community. The opening session explored how AI is changing education and professional development, asking what we need to keep learning when technology can provide answers, generate ideas and simulate conversations.
A healthcare professional explains a procedure clearly but misses the patient’s fear. A student produces an answer but cannot explain the reasoning behind it. As AI becomes part of learning and work, how can we ensure that people develop the understanding and judgement they need?
These questions shaped the discussion at “AI is here – do we all need to go back to school?”, the first InnoStars Community Meeting. Moderated by Ricardo Vieira-Pires, Health Community Lead at InnoStars, the session featured Jorge Figueira from the University of Coimbra and Kuba Pędziwiatr, CEO and Co-founder of MetaSkills.
Teaching people to question the answer
For Jorge Figueira, adapting education to AI starts with the people who teach. “The ones that have to adapt more are the teachers” he said.
Figueira highlighted four areas that deserve sustained practice: critical thinking, creativity and problem framing, emotional intelligence and empathy, and ethical reasoning and responsibility. His starting point was the Socratic method: asking questions, listening to the answers and asking further questions that help students develop their reasoning and reach conclusions themselves.
He illustrated this approach through the example of Portuguese poet and teacher Sebastião da Gama, who asked pupils to bring jokes into the classroom. Their jokes became material for lessons on punctuation, metaphor and irony. The teacher used his subject knowledge to turn something the pupils enjoyed into an opportunity to learn.
The example raised a question relevant beyond the classroom: how can educators build on learners’ interests while helping them think more deeply? For Figueira, the aim is to develop curiosity and the ability to keep learning. “Instead of throwing concepts and throwing definitions to the class, you walk with the students on a path to learn how to learn more,” he explained.
Alongside critical thinking, Figueira stressed the importance of practising skills that depend on interaction with others, including negotiation, conflict resolution and shared decision-making. “You can use AI to do part of the work, but you cannot do it without communication with real people and decision making with real people” he added.
Practising difficult conversations before they happen
Kuba Pędziwiatr approached the discussion through a situation familiar to healthcare teams: a worried parent asks a difficult question, and a healthcare professional has to explain what happens next. “Where can that professional practise this conversation before it happens in real life?” he asked.
Pędziwiatr shared lessons from pilots involving 117 participants across five university and hospital sites in Spain, conducted with Metamedics VR through the VR Health Champions consortium.
The first lesson concerned authenticity. “The conversation needs to feel real. Even with the right words, it can feel artificial,” he said, explaining that clinicians helped the team get the emotion and context right.
The second concerned how training fits into teaching. “People need easy access, they need support from the educator, and they need a clear reason to come back to our platform and start practising again.”
The next step, he explained, is to assess whether repeated practice improves communication in everyday work. He also called for patients and families to have a stronger voice in defining what good communication should feel like.
Making the community’s experience available to others
Sharing these practical lessons is a central reason for the new InnoStars series. The first session gave participants access to both an educational perspective and experience from healthcare pilots, including the questions that remain unresolved.
Introducing the meetings, Joanna Sabat, Ecosystem Lead at InnoStars, explained: “It’s really coming from understanding that we could be sharing more with the world, on our projects, on the results, and on what we are learning together, running innovation work around health topics.”
InnoStars’ contribution is to bring those experiences into a shared discussion, where educators, innovators and healthcare organisations can ask how they relate to their own work. Audience questions are part of the format, alongside opportunities to introduce participants’ interests and suggest future speakers.
“We are making those meetings open for everybody who is curious, who would like to know more, who would like to share their thoughts,” Sabat said.
Watch full recording
Join the next conversation
The InnoStars Community Meetings take place monthly and are open to everyone interested in health innovation. The next session, “VR Revolution in Healthcare”, will take place on 10 November 2026, exploring virtual reality in healthcare and building on themes introduced during the first discussion.
The session will feature:
- Elio Salvadori, Founder & Scientific Advisor at MEEVA Srl Società Benefit
- Michael Barngrover, Managing Director at XR4Europe
- Sarah Haddadin from InnoStars will moderate the discussion.
Join us to ask the speakers your questions and connect with other participants.