Smart Capacitating Investment (SCI) - enabling innovative health promotion

European health systems face mounting challenges in sustaining effective health promotion and disease prevention. Addressing these requires investment models and governance structures capable of supporting scalable, cross-sectoral interventions. The European Invest4Health project, developed the conceptual and operational foundations for Smart Capacitating Investment (SCI), with the aim of enabling durable, data-informed and citizen-inclusive models for improving population health and promoting preventive health. This helps to move away from hospital focused, to a more community-based care.

The project undertook a systematic examination of existing business models across the different regions in Europe, identifying their underlying value propositions, prioritisation logics, financing mechanisms and governance arrangements. Through comparative analyses, including models from non-health sectors, the project assessed their compatibility with SCI principles and their capacity to support scalable prevention-oriented interventions. This work established an empirical foundation for constructing prototypes of SCI-compatible business models. Recognising that sustained public health impact depends on the active involvement of citizens, the project further investigated institutionalised processes for co-design, co-production and participatory co-governance. By mapping current practices and evaluating them with citizen and patient panels, the project identified enablers and constraints for embedding active citizenship within investment and governance frameworks. A parallel dialogue with policy-makers examined viable budgeting strategies for supporting such involvement, including models of co-ownership and recognised evaluation methodologies.

Central to project was the development of physical and digital, platform-enabled collaborative spaces that facilitate structured interaction among heterogeneous actors. These platforms function as intermediating infrastructures through which roles, value flows, data streams and governance processes can be formalised, compared and, ultimately, scaled. The project also analysed architectures for secure and interoperable data integration, validating their applicability.

Finally, the project synthesised insights from its analytical, participatory and technical strands to propose a coherent and sustainable framework for SCI-based business models. This framework enables regions to organise and co-govern collaborative spaces in ways that strengthen their capacity to design, finance and scale interventions that advance population health. Through this integrated approach, the project contributes core knowledge and tools necessary for enabling transformative and scalable public health action in diverse European contexts.