Kurt Höller appointed MD of Germany-Switzerland CLC

The German-Swiss EIT Health CLC is pleased to announce that Dr. Kurt Höller has been appointed the new Managing Director. He begins his role today, 11 September 2023.

Kurt is already 100% familiar with EIT Health and is quite well-known within the community. He has been acting as a host, moderator, and panellist in numerous events.

Kurt was a major contributor to setting up the German CLC in 2012 and served as Vice Chairman of EIT Health Germany’s Supervisory Board until 2015. As former Director of Business Creation, Kurt was giving shape to the whole Accelerator Pillar and Start-Up programmes from 2015 until 2022. Afterwards, he took over as a Managing Director of InvestHealth, including programmes like Gold Track and VCoE. Since 2016, more than 1000 startups supported in his area of responsibility have raised 3bn€+.[1]

During these past eight years as one of the first and longest-serving members of the EIT Health Management Board, Kurt also took over as interim EIT Health COO (2019) and as interim director of Education (in 2019/20) in addition to his regular director role. He also initiated and supervised the marketing team until 2021.

Before EIT Health started to exist, Kurt brought strong expertise and background in academia, entrepreneurship and politics to the underlying InnoLIFE consortium, where he was part of the Executive Committee representing the German and Swiss members.

From 2009 to 2015, Kurt has been the founding director of the Central Institute of Healthcare Engineering (ZIMT) at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. Since then, he has gone on to found and direct several other spin-offs and companies: CiNNAMED GmbH (2013, CEO and co-founder), Portabiles GmbH (2014, CFO and co-founder), and HOELLER ELECTRONIC GmbH (CEO in 2015). Since May 2015, he has been a member of the city council in Erlangen and a member (since July 2020 vice-chairman) of the supervisory board of ESTW AG, a company with 230mio€+ annual revenue and 500+ employees.

After attaining his Diploma of Electrical Engineering at FAU in 2005, he gained his Doctorate at FAU with research stays at TUM and Johns Hopkins University (JHU), USA. His research activities focused heavily on health innovation, with his thesis on “Novel Techniques for Spatial Orientation in Natural Orifice Transluminal Endoscopic Surgery (NOTES)” (book published in 2011). In addition, he has published 30+ journal articles, conference papers and patents. Kurt went on to earn an MBA with a focus on Entrepreneurship at Deggendorf Institute of Technology (THD) with a research stay at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley.

Kurt bears a very strong network within the German and Swiss Healthtech community and is very much looking forward to re-positioning the CLC as a strong player and facilitator in this field.

The team at the German-Swiss EIT Health CLC heartily welcomes Kurt to his new position. Please join us in welcoming Kurt to his new role!

Links: