Empathy-driven innovation at the University of Galway

In today’s episode, we have invited Dr. Natalie Walsh, Director of Entrepreneurial Development at the University of Galway, to discuss the Empathy Studio, a unique initiative that immerses students in the experiences of others to inspire human-centred solutions.

We’ll learn how this approach is reshaping problem-solving at the university and why empathy is crucial in innovation. Join us as we delve into the role of empathy in education, entrepreneurship, and beyond.

You can listen to the full interview in our podcast:

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Transcript

Madeline Arkins:
Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Natalie Walsh. I also had the privilege of moderating a session with Natalie at this year’s UIIN Conference, where Natalie was presenting, and I found it really fascinating, so I’m sure it’s going to be a great discussion today.

Natalie is the Director of Entrepreneurial Development and Co-Lead of Patient and Public Involvement in Research and Innovation at the University of Galway. She brings with her over 17 years of experience in higher education and expertise in human-centered design. She has held senior roles in the College of Medicine, Nursing, and Health Sciences, and in the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation.

In her current role, she drives innovation and entrepreneurial thinking at IdeasLab, which is the University of Galway’s hub for innovation and entrepreneurship. And she, somehow, also has time to complete an innovation fellowship at Stanford University. So thanks, Natalie, for fitting in time to speak to us.

Natalie Walsh:
Thank you. It’s lovely to join you this afternoon.

Madeline Arkins:
Thank you. To get us started, Natalie, for the uninitiated, can you share a bit about your work at the Empathy Studio? How did you come to the Empathy Studio and how the studio came to be?

Natalie Walsh:
About four years ago, the Irish government launched a call for innovative, risk-taking projects. We looked at the blank page, like all of us do when these opportunities come, and thought: What can we do? How could we make a difference and what’s novel and unique? We had been working in design thinking for about four years at the time, and one of the challenges that we identified was: How do we really immerse the students in the empathy stage? Particularly because we are asking them to solve a problem that maybe they don’t understand or identify with. How can we support them to walk in the shoes of the person and to understand that lived experience, so that when we are inviting them to ideate and define the problem, they do it from a person-centric perspective and they are consider the lived experience?

That was the genesis for the empathy studio. We have a sister program on campus called BioInnovate Ireland. They’re a Stanford affiliate and part of the BioDesign group. We were always fascinated by the first stage of their program, which is called Immersion. They get to go into a clinical setting and spend about two months in the hospital. They are observing, interviewing and writing as many needs statements as they can, with a view that they will narrow that through the second stage of the process and identify an unmet clinical need.

We took inspiration from them and the opportunity of the proposal to create the Empathy Studio. And it was launched about two years ago formally, and we have put it through about five or six different programs at this stage, still very much in piloting. It is one of these areas that we are always going to be learning and growing and curating content and material for, but it has become a real focal point for us on campus in terms of giving students access to environments, simulations, and understanding the lived experience in a different way. Particularly, as we stage-gate them in terms of access to what may be a patient group or a vulnerable group, so that we are considering the entirety of their experience as learners, meeting them where they are at and expanding their skills on the journey.

Madeline Arkins:
Getting into the nitty gritty of how that is done, in the description for this event we alluded to some virtual reality applications. Can you tell us a bit more about the sort of techniques that you impart?

Natalie Walsh:
On paper, when we designed the studio, we focused on technology-driven support, things like virtual reality. We invested in some medical-grade simulations. Then, we had a very detailed conversation with our medical simulation unit on campus, and what we felt was that the technology is really important, but it could be distracting from the human aspect of empathy.

We went back to the drawing board and thought how could democratise technology and give students access to cutting edge material, but not take them so far away from the human experience that they lose sight of its importance in the innovation journey.

Where we have actually invested most of our time and effort is around human simulation, and that is role playing, acting, we do some forum theatre as well, and what we found that we are heightening the human skills of the students in terms of communication, deeper understanding of the problem because they can probe and ask questions completely transforming the solution directions that are coming out. But we can still support them or scaffold their experience by using technology like virtual reality. And it is powerful, maybe in a context where we know, for example, we cannot drop a student into an operation theatre, unless they are a medical student specialising in surgery. But what we can do is we can give them a walkthrough using virtual reality of what a theatre looks like, what it sounds like, where your operating table is, how the different aspects around the table work, where people maybe place themselves in a surgery. That just adds another layer of understanding to the problem.

It is more the human-centeredness and the simulation what we have found has added more value in terms of empathy and students deep diving into the problem. At the UIIN Conference this year, we shared the Boston Scientific Challenge and Synthesis Medical, a company who worked with us on that. They were looking at the stoma market, which is an opening on the body, and we used one of our manikins for multidisciplinary student teams to understand exactly that where physically the stoma is located, how it operates in terms of the colostomy bag, how you clean it, how you put it on, take it off. Then, we got them to wear a colostomy bag and filled it with water and asked them to walk the campus

Some of the students struggled to close their trousers because they weren’t used to the extra width around the waist that it required. Some leaked, which is part of the lived experience of people with stomas. And we asked them to use a bathroom facility on campus, just to see how far the sink can often be from the toilet, unless you have a disability toilet, which are limited in society… We really got them close to the problem. At that stage, they spent a couple of weeks working on their empathy mapping and their stakeholder mapping. Then they understood the problem from a technical perspective, more than anything else. We then got them to spend time with the stoma nurse. In our hospital and they queued and waited their time. They had their appointment and what our first appointment looked like.

At that point, we introduce them to a panel of patients who work with us, because students at that point understood some aspects of the experience, but they didn’t understand it from the person who lived experience. It was critically important that we connected them with people who are living with stomas and colostomy bags. That was powerful because the types of questions they asked were thoughtful and insightful and were around the day-to-day life, the challenges, the adjustments where the person living with the stoma felt that there could be an enhancement. What waking up from that surgery looked like, because for a lot of people, it is quite overwhelming when you have your surgery and then your entire life routine, since you were a toddler, learning to use the toilet has totally changed, and there’s a vulnerability in that.

The students then worked with Boston to specifically look at a care point at the post-surgery stage to reduce readmittance. There’s an ethical perspective to it in terms of, we want them to do it true to the challenges that patients are facing. We want to look at it societally in terms of making sure they have the best lives they can so that having the stomas is not a limiting factor. But there’s also a commercial case from Boston Scientific’s perspective. They want that three-pound approach that considers the lived experience, the commercial opportunity and the impact on society and the health system. By engaging with the Empathy Studio, we could touch on all those points and create solution directions that were more fit for purpose.

Madeline Arkins:
It’s amazing that understanding the patient point of view actually requires the involvement of so many different actors. I know that the Centre for Drama and Performance are also involved in those enactments that you described, and having Boston Scientific and Synthesis Medical involved is a value add.

I’d love to hear more about that particular collaboration, because as we at UIIN love hearing about university-industry collaboration and how that works out. Can you tell me a bit more about that partnership, how it came about and what was the clincher in its success?

Natalie Walsh:
From our perspective, going back to this proposal opportunity, it hugely focused on skills development for industry and responding to a deficit in skills around innovation and entrepreneurship. We were finding that people have really good technical skills, we have brilliant engineers, we have brilliant scientists, but it is looking at life through a different lens, when we talk about innovation and entrepreneurship communication skills, human, or soft skills. We met with Boston Scientific and said: We have this fantastic opportunity, we have a blank page and would love to work with you, but we also need to be considered of your time and the effort that you put into the relationship because it is taking from their core day jobs and core roles. So, we developed models based on the UIIN engagement framework and approach to working with industry. From that our relationship has grown.

We started during COVID in a virtual world, and Boston Scientific put their hands up straight away to run an enterprise challenge with us. Our first challenge out was something that we could ask the students to do at home to a large extent: Stent preparation. A stent nurse has to prepare a stent for surgery and placement in the heart, and they have to hold their hands in freezing cold water for nine minutes to prepare the stent and it is similar to threading a needle. If you can imagine threading a needle underwater in freezing cold water for nine minutes, that’s what a nurse does to support the surgeon in terms of surgery. That is something that we can ask the students to replicate at home in their own environment, so they then have an understanding and an empathy of what that nurse’s role looks like. We could then facilitate an online session with a Cath Lab nurse, and they were mentored by Boston every week as well. Students are getting that multiple stakeholder perspective, and in this case, they got access to speak with surgeons, nurses and hospital staff.

It was really powerful and very low fidelity, they only needed a needle, a thread and cold water in essence, but it does require the contribution of experts. We are really structured in our approach to that because it is very student-led in terms of the mentoring and the questioning. The students work on the project during the week, and they meet the mentor on a Friday morning. It has worked really well, and we are now going into our fourth year working with Boston Scientific.

Our last challenge was around sustainability, so we are not just looking at MedTech. And that is the beauty of empathy, it sits in every sector. Sustainability was our challenge last semester and, similarly, we could give the students access to understanding, from a medical device company’s perspective, what sustainability meant: If they have an infringement, what are the penalties attached to it, and the importance of equipment and medical devices have to reach their destination in prime condition, sterilised, and all the challenges that are faced in terms of transiting across the globe under that it in a highly sustainable way.

It has worked really well in all of the situations where we have tried it. And it also gives us a chance to explore, have some fun, be creative, and practice what we preach in terms of coming up with the empathy experiences. And making sure that they are scaffolded through the weeks of the programs that we run.

Madeline Arkins:
It is also great to hear of a scenario like that where a partner joins for one initiative, but then it grows into something more long-term that is both a value for them, the students, and for the Empathy Studio.

I wanted to touch on something you mentioned, which was human skills and soft skills and why perhaps there is such, I don’t want to say war, but maybe conflict between those that feel that technical expertise maybe trumps all in many fields and that these human skills are kind of left to the wayside or not deemed as important.

Why do you think they are so crucial, particularly in areas of innovation?

Natalie Walsh:
They are so crucial because they are what differentiates us. Artificial Inteligence is the word of the year. When we’re now doing our programming, we introduce AI because it is the calculator of tomorrow. It is going to run alongside us and it’s becoming a core part of how we operate. But to successfully leverage technology, I think you need heightened human skills and particularly around things like critical thinking.

There are huge amounts of misinformation out there. I use ChatGPT and as much as it is really useful for some efficiency, there are times when I’m looking at the outcome and I know it is not right. So these skills are really important in terms of sense checking yourself, understanding your critical thinking, keeping it fresh and not being overly reliant on the outputs. Taking the time to curate your questions, attempt to respond and build your solution directions, and then leverage technology when you need to, or when it makes sense from an efficiency perspective. I don’t think it’s ever going to be an either or, I think it is not one at the cost of the other.

Madeline Arkins:
I would love to ask you something that came up while you were presenting at our conference: How do you measure the success of the Empathy Studio? How do you measure how empathy has grown in students over time?

Natalie Walsh:
Measuring effectiveness is a really interesting one because when we started looking at tools and measures, the first place we went to was our Institute for Lifecourse and Society (ILAS), who have a huge amount of experience in social empathy, and particularly activating youth empathy. Their patron is Cillian Murphy, and they have published a book called Ionbhá: The Empathy Book for Ireland. It’s a fascinating read, he has written in it as well.

We started with them, and we looked at a few different instruments that were validated, and what we found was they were very focused on social empathy as opposed to empathy within an innovation landscape. Then, we went and looked at Entrecomp, a suite of supports, tools and assets developed by the EU that help you to understand innovation entrepreneurship at institutional level, but there’s also tools there, specifically one called EPIC that helps you to do pre- and post-assessment. It has 442 learning outcomes, it is a complex beast, but four of the learning outcomes are specifically linked to empathy.

We did a lot of mapping, and we identified the questions that linked back to empathy, and we issued them to surveys, so we do a pre- and post-. What we found through them is that there was an increase in the empathy of our students who had taken part in a program where the Empathy Studio was attached. Just last couple of weeks, we have come across some other work that happens in Jefferson University in the States, and they have a model called the Jefferson Scale of Empathy. We are going to look a little bit more at this because we are engaging more with our College of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences.

Within the model there are 20 questions, it is statistically valid, has been tested numerous times and is now being used outside of the medical student setting with other student groups, which is important because we are multidisciplinary. There will be a health sciences student on every team, but not every student is a healthcare student. We have been through the questions, and we think a lot of them apply, so we are going to meet with our colleagues in ILAS to see if we could take an adapted version of this and trial it through one of our programs because it is a really nice instrument, and we may get the opportunity to look at this more longitudinally.

I never thought I would say evaluation was exciting, because I’m not an evaluation person, but it is actually really exciting to see huge value in deviating off the path in terms of how we would evaluate it previously and look at some other tools that may give us a better depth and breadth of understanding of empathy.

Madeline Arkins:
What a win to be in the development to build a module for year one, because I feel like that year one for health science students is so critical in how they look at their career going forward.

Looking at the wider entrepreneurship ecosystem in Ireland, because Empathy Studio is part of the Ideas Lab, how does Empathy Studio fit in the wider entrepreneurship ecosystem in Ireland?

Natalie Walsh:
We are seeing an increase in human-centred design being used in Ireland. In the last couple of years, several institutions have really developed expertise in it, so we have seen an interest in our approach to empathy. We are also really interested in terms of what other people are doing. Programs like the Stanford BioDesign program and the term Immersion are also increasing, and some of that is in relation to a poll that we had in Ireland called the Innovators Initiative, which was launched last year. The University of Galway secured funding for their BioInnovate program through it, but there are other innovator initiatives.

There are three or four funded, one per region, but they all take this approach to immersion. Then obviously we have the Institute for Art and Design (IADT) in Ireland as well, who are doing phenomenal work. There is a really nice synergy across our institutions. I would love to start seeing more European projects and proposals with the focusing on empathy because where we look at it through a commercial lens here or through an innovation lens, there’s societal impact as well. For things like war and rioting, empathy does not happen at the extremes. So as far as we can support people to be empathetic, it means they don’t exist in the extreme. We could have a much nicer and kinder society if we could embed more empathy education and training. From my perspective, it is fantastic to see that we are doing innovation and entrepreneurship, but it has such potential nationally and internationally for us.

And colleagues in ILAS have developed a suite of programs for primary and secondary schools to introduce empathy earlier. There is even a baby program. Young mothers bring their babies into schools or there is a charity group in Ireland, Roots of Empathy, and it introduces children to empathy and understanding babies and kindness. Opportunities like that are huge, but the innovation-entrepreneurship space is so transformative, and it’s such a place of change that we will create better solution directions that are more useful to society if we actively engage in it.

I’m delighted to be part of something where we are seeing the value of and are working to spread the word through things like today with UIIN.

Madeline Arkins:
That is a very poetic note, Natalie, and I entirely agree about more European projects on this topic because sometimes there’s an idea that the more morally high something is, the less that money should be involved. And yet there, it is exactly the opposite. I feel like we should be putting our efforts and resources in something like this that is so crucial. I am conscious of our time. I do see we have a question from the audience asking, how can we get involved with the Empathy Studio?

Natalie Walsh:
Drop me an email. Feel free to reach out, we are really interested in partnering, exploring this topic, hosting people as well. If people are interested to come and see us, we would be delighted to do that as well.

Madeline Arkins:
Fabulous. It is such a fascinating topic; I could ask you many more questions. It is amazing that on anything to do with technological advancement, we always talk about the rate and pace of change and disruptors, and yet with fundamental skills like empathy, it really it is so constant and it’s heartening to see that such initiatives are at the Empathy Studio and championed there.

Thank you so much for your time, Natalie, and thank you all for joining in.

Natalie Walsh:
Lovely to be here with you. Take care.

Ready for more?

In our article, The road to ethical partnerships: Lessons from university-industry collaborations, we look at dilemmas that can arise in partnerships and share our learnings to show what to keep in mind to make your partnerships mutually beneficial, while also being ethical.

If you want to look at a student-centred, university-industry partnership from the academic perspective, listen to our episode Future-ready students: The transformative impact of industry-integrated courses and learn all about the collaboration between Jönköping University’s School of Engineering and Husqvarna, one of the largest companies in the region.

Stay tuned for the next episode on this series and don’t forget to follow us on your preferred podcast platform!