On January 29, 2013 a Conference and Exhibition event for the healthcare and wellbeing cluster in the Netherlands called Health Tech Event attracted some 150 participants and several start-ups to participate. The event took place at the High Tech Campus, Eindhoven.
With the ever-increasing rise in an aging population, new or non-curable diseases, the lack of medical infrastructure in many countries and the constant pressure on governments to better manage costs, healthcare is more than ever a critical global issue. Collaborative open innovation between industry players can significantly contribute to combating world healthcare issues and help find solutions that can be implemented faster and more effectively. These issues and more were the focus of the Health Tech Event. Speakers and participants discussed how open innovation gives them a competitive edge.
Primary Prevention on Health & Wellbeing
EIT ICT Labs’ Action Line Health & Wellbeing contributed to the discussion as mentioned above with a workshop on Primary Prevention on Health & Wellbeing that was presented by Jean Gelissen, action line leader of Health & Wellbeing. In his presentation Jean Gelissen mentioned that Research has the tendency to focus on specific problems, targeting specific groups in a specific context. Hence, often implementing the solutions got bogged down by non-functional barriers such as legal issues per country, privacy rules or differences in social and cultural systems and habits. Therefore, the Health& Wellbeing action line of EIT ICT Labs wants to force a breakthrough based on its Active Healthy Ageing platform concept. This platform is an ICT system that incorporates the functional and non-functional aspects in its design.
Boost for European SMEs
When combining research and the companies producing wellbeing innovations EIT ICT Labs can foster the European HWB cluster. The Knowledge Innovation Community of EIT ICT labs will
strengthen, integrate and mobilise local ecosystem actors of 4 EIT ICT Labs nodes: Trento, Helsinki, Eindhoven and Paris.
EIT ICT Labs will select 3-5 SMEs from each node, with the aim of involving them in our HWB activities and connecting them better with each other. The companies get to identify new business opportunities, both cross-node and outside EIT nodes as well as to understand differences between geographic markets.
For more information about the Call for SMEs, please, contact Action Line Leader Jean Gelissen or the respective activity coordinator in this, Marko Turpeinen:
jean.gelissen@eitictlabs.eu or marko.turpeinen@eitictlabs.eu
