Final KTI 2018 Workshop organised in Erlangen, Germany

RIS Hubs & EIT Health InnoStars promote good practices of the most successful innovation ecosystem

On 6–8 November, as the third international Regional Innovation Scheme Knowledge Triangle Integration (KTI) event of the year, EIT Health InnoStars continued to promote insights and good practices of the most successful innovation ecosystems – this time in Erlangen, Germany.

Following the ASTP-Proton Annual Conference on technology transfer in Liège in May and the visit to Haifa, Israel, at Technion in October, the last KTI event of 2018 was organised in Erlangen. The event was hosted by the EIT Health members Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg and the Medical Valley EMN

here were 36 delegates of EIT Health RIS Hubs, and InnoStars Partners, who participated in the programmes which took place in the inspiring venue of the Digital Health Innovation Platform.

Two keynote speakers, Erich R. Reinhardt, President of Medical Valley EMN and former CEO of Siemens Healthcare, and Max Riedel, Senior Consultant at Siemens opened the event.

In his talk, Prof. Reinhardt summarised his experiences in building this extraordinarily successful innovation ecosystem.. Dr. Riedel gave an overview of the success factors for strategic industry-university partnerships in his presentation.

The presenters of the three-day event, experts from Friedrich-Alexander University, Medical Valley EMN, Siemens Healthineers and the representatives of associated start-up companies provided great insights and hands-on experience about one of the leading innovation ecosystems in Europe.

The EIT Health InnoStars group was also invited for a historical overview of Siemens’ breakthrough inventions through a guided tour in the Siemens Healthineers MedMuseum and also for another tour presenting the outstanding innovation activities of Machine Learning and Data Analytics Lab of the University.

In the two sessions of EIT Health InnoStars interactive workshops, the delegates summed up the motivating learnings of the impressive programmes of the visit. The representatives of RIS Hubs also presented their draft Regional Action Plans and discussed challenges of the regional innovation ecosystem improvement the RIS Hubs should meet in their final Action Plans for 2019.

Based on the positive feedback from the participants, EIT Health InnoStars plans to continue the promotion of good practices of the most successful European innovation ecosystems through organising KTI workshops in 2019 as well.

Testimonials from the participants:

• “This region is amazing! It has a lot of dedicated people promoting the cooperation of companies, universities, research institutions and talents, showing that it is not impossible to build such a cluster. Teams all over Europe should be supported to spend some time here to learn.”
• “I learned in Erlangen that mindset is more powerful than any legal or financial setups.”
• “Another good chance to get in contact with the actors of EIT Health network and to better understand that we are going in the right direction.”
• “The most important take-home message of the Erlangen visit for us: Time to market! We learned here that we should not concentrate on IP portfolios in the future.”