The consortium, coordinated by Biocat, the Catalan Bioregion, and involving as partners the Paris Regional Medical Society, BioRN Rhein-Neckar Life Sciences Cluster, the Danish Life Sciences Cluster, the Bulgarian Health and Life Sciences Cluster and the European Bioregions Council, was formed with the idea of improving itself and has developed the tools to make it happen within the European project INNAXE (see box).
The Consortium has developed a toolbox to help clusters both benchmark their regions (looking at what is and isn’t working in their region) and assess the impact of their activities (looking at which activities are actually useful in a given context), with the aim of identifying activities that bring real added value to the ecosystem.
“The toolbox is available free of charge and enables all interested life sciences and healthcare clusters, regardless of their background, to carry out the most useful and most impactful activities suited to their respective context,” says Friedemann Roos, Project Manager at BioRN.
To transfer this rather academic endeavour into the real world and generate real benefits, the most effective activities, which would particularly benefit from an international scope, are currently being implemented by the Consortium in a five-year plan, which was initially validated and optimised through surveys, interviews and foresight workshops with the different actors of the participating clusters.
The result is a balanced mix of activities that:
Supporting participation in international conferences (e.g. consolidating existing partnership agreements with conference organizers to offer even more discounts to stakeholders); Facilitating matchmaking between innovators and investors (e.g. actively engaging start-ups and investors from all partner regions); Improving access to health data (e.g. supporting local ecosystems in the harmonization process between EU, national and regional levels); Building international communities (e.g. offering joint appearances and shared spaces at major conferences)
These and other activities of the Plan are intrinsically linked to the strategies of the Partner Clusters, ensuring their continued engagement. In this way, these activities benefit the local ecosystem and, through their international component, fill existing knowledge gaps in Europe.
INNAXE (INNovation Agendas Comprehensive and Coherent Pan-European) is a European Union funded project, coordinated by Biocat (Catalonia, Spain) and run by partners including Medicen (Paris Region, France), BioRN (Rhein-Main-Neckar Region, Germany), the Bulgarian Health & Life Science Cluster, the Danish Life Science Cluster and the European Bioregions Council. It has a budget of around 500,000 euros and will run for two years, from July 2022 to June 2024.
contact:
Friedemann Roth
Innovation Manager
BioRN Network eV
Email: fl@biorn.org
