GE Launches Finnish Health Tech Startup Campus

GE Healthcare (GE; Little Chalfont, United Kingdom) has inaugurated the Health Innovation Village, a new campus designed to help entrepreneurs in Finland speed up healthcare technology solutions.

The Health Innovation Village was launched at GE Finland headquarters in Vallila (Helsinki) in October 2014 as an ecosystem of health tech startups, and is now home to 20 companies, including Fjuul, a software company that has created a smartphone app that allows people to monitor their daily physical activity, and Beibamboo, a company that designs premature baby clothing that will allow clothes to be removed without disturbing intravenous (IV) tubes and other necessary monitoring equipment.

The village was the brainchild of managing director of GE Finland Didier Deltort and head of finance and country manager Mikko Kauppinen. Their vision is of a place where young entrepreneurs and engineers work and socialize in the same environment as more seasoned minds in their fields. This creates an environment of “manageable chaos,” where new ideas are allowed to flourish, unhindered by more traditional business practices, yet still properly managed and put to the test before being developed further. To help them, about 800 GE employees on the site are available to provide advice and support.

”The health sector needs speedy clinically relevant and affordable innovations. We believe the magic formula is the combination of large global corporations and agile startups, co-located,” said Didier Deltort. “We wanted to bring them closer, because innovations are created when people meet. Living close to startups, exchanging ideas and eventually working together on innovative projects is fresh thinking. Eventually, this benefits our customers, too.”

“Finland is considered to be one of the leading countries in the research and innovation for personalized healthcare. We also have top research competences in many therapy areas and versatile competences in health technology, such as diagnostics and imaging,” said Finnish Minister of Economic Affairs Jan Vapaavuori at the opening ceremony. “So I am positive about our ability to gear up health sector’s growth. I also trust that the GE Health Village will be one of the new and important platforms in helping our R&D investment, also the public one, being turned into commercially viable businesses.”

The health sector generates about EUR 5 billion of economic output in Finland, with most of the output going to exports. In fact, Health Tech is the largest and most important Finnish export sector, representing 47% of all Finnish hi-tech exports.

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