The Inspirational Talk event organised by EIT Health took place on 7 December 2021. The event was also attended by a member of the South Transdanubian Regional Innovation Agency (STRIA) to use the knowledge and experience gained in the agency’s medical technology project (Medtech4 Europe).
The EIT Health was established in 2015 as the European Institute of Innovation and Technology’s (EIT) “Knowledge and Innovation Community” (KIC). The EIT is made up of different KICs, each focusing on a different sector or area of innovation – in our case, health and ageing.
This KIC aims to overcome barriers to improve healthcare in Europe and enable life-changing solutions. By working together, KIC actors can remove cross-border barriers to create a more flexible and dynamic European healthcare system.
In two different European regions, two organisations are successfully demonstrating that supporting local ecosystem actors in their efforts to bring internationally competitive products to market is a return on investment. BIOCAT, based in Barcelona (Catalonia) and Innovation Quarter, based in the South of the Netherlands (Rotterdam metropolitan area, The Hague region), provide financial support and guidance to local and national governments, companies/investors, academic institutions and hospitals.
As part of the meeting, representatives of BIOCAT and Innovation Quarter, who have been involved in the projects and have been part of them from the beginning, were invited to a discussion.
The discussion covered the following topics:
- What type of support actions do they provide to whom? what results do they deliver?
- What are the incentives for their founders to keep funding them to do these activities?
- What are minimal ecosystem conditions for them to do their jobs?
- What are the challenges that these ecosystems face from regional, European and global perspectives?
The Medtech4 Europe project is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and Hungary within the Interreg Europe Program.