Scandinavian and Spanish EIT Health partners meet at the Barcelona Science Park
On Friday October 7, the Barcelona Science Park (PCB) held a bilateral meeting for the European project EIT Health, which gathered more than forty-five Spanish and Scandinavian partners from this knowledge and innovation community (KIC), specialized on healthy life and active aging.
On Friday October 7, the Barcelona Science Park (PCB) held a bilateral meeting for the European project EIT Health, which gathered more than forty-five Spanish and Scandinavian partners from this knowledge and innovation community (KIC), specialized on healthy life and active aging.
The meeting was organized by the Spanish and Scandinavian CLCs, aiming to promote new opportunities and competitive advantages through co-operations in R&D. The meeting, which was developed in a B2B model, brought interaction between scientists and companies that participate actively in the EIT Health innovation areas. This is the second bilateral meeting that takes place in Barcelona within this project; the first one took place in June and the invited CLC was the French.
According to Marco Pugliese, professor at the Department of Biomedicine of the University of Barcelona and director of EIT Health Spain, “This second bilateral meeting experience confirms the usefulness of these activities to foster and enhance synergies between partners of the EIT Health Community”. “Projects, activities and business ideas that were presented in the meeting confirmed that there is a huge space of cooperation between partners of both CLCs. As Spanish CLC, our intention is to continue these bilateral meeting also during 2017 with the intention to invite all CLCs to visit us to show our potential and strength”.
Pallehoy Jakobsen, director of EIT Health Scandinavia, said the meeting was “an excellent matchmaking event with a lot of interesting pitches and productive discussions about collaborative opportunities”.
The activities started on Thursday October 6 with a Spanish wine tasting and a casual dinner to break the ice. On Friday, Pugliese and Jakobsen opened the meeting presenting the CLCs they direct and then the attention was focused on more than fifty elevator pitches, briefly presenting their projects aiming to find possible collaborations. The second part of the session started at noon, when the partners who had scheduled meetings through the web app had the chance to share their needs and find potential future partners. At the end of the day, the attendants had participated in more than ninety scheduled meetings, a higher figure than what they expected in the meetingʼs objectives.
EITH Health is a consortium with a total of 144 leading companies, universities and research centers from 14 European countries. With a fund of 2.100 million euros, it is one of the most ambitious initiatives developed in the health field with public financial aid. Until late 2016, the consortium expects to create seventy start-ups per year and involve a million students in the programs driven by EIT Health.