Introduction: In October 2015, the Belgian Health Ministers launched a joint plan in favour of chronic patients entitled “Integrated Care for Better Health” [1]. Through this plan, they expressed their intention to move from a fragmented system to an integrated care system for patients with chronic diseases. They decided to implement this plan in a bottom-up way: they launched a call for multidisciplinary four-year pilot projects involving field actors in a co-creation process in order to initiate innovation at the local level.Methods: This qualitative and inductive research draws on several data collection methods: interviews N=21, focus groups N=7, direct observation 90.5 hours, documentary analysis operational documents and a literature review. The data, pertaining to two aspiring pilot projects, were collected during the “conceptualisation phase”, i.e. the application writing period.Results: According to the authorities ‘guidelines, pilot project consortia had to identify a pilot zone and include a variety of first-line and second-line care actors together with non-medical actors e.g. social and cultural actors working in this zone.They were asked to identify the needs of their population and the available/missing resources in their pilot zone. On the basis of this, they had to write a loco-regional action plan in which they outlined their common vision, their strategic and operational objectives and the actions they would implement to achieve these objectives.Discussions: During the conceptualisation phase, different actors, who would probably not have met otherwise, came to work together, overcoming the traditional fragmentation between first- and second-line of care. More than that, by including non-medical stakeholders, the pilot project consortia extended to the community. Multidisciplinarity, coconstruction, cooperation, coordination, targeting a community/defined population in a delimited territory, initiatives “driven by community health needs” [2], sharing goals and resources, all these elements ...