What a visit to Brussels in December can bring!

On Friday we had the pleasure of welcoming Bernd Reichert, Head of Unit  “SMEs in Horizon 2020” at the European Agency for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises, to the Life Science Cluster at Sveavägen 63, Stockholm. He participated in a lunchtime talk about Sweden’s “From Start-Up to the Stock Market” model, focusing on health.

Nina Rawal of the Industrial Fund led the discussion and made it  possible for everyone to have a word. Representatives from the Zenicor,  Immunovia, InDex and Bioservo companies were able to join us. They shared their thoughts and experiences about being in receipt of funding from one or other of the EU funding programmes.

The discussion then went on to include a large number of representatives of industry associations, Nasdaq, investors, companies, and innovation stakeholders from all over Sweden.

Many thanks to all for helping us discuss Sweden’s strengths and how we can help meet global challenges, but also helping us identify the needs we believe the EU should work to meet in order to increase capacity for innovation and growth.

Among other things, we take the following home with us:

•  The SME instrument is very positive. It fills an important gap between soft and hard money. Keep up the good work and develop the instrument further.
• Using phase 1 just to open the door to phase 2. Is this the best way to spend €50 000?
• How do we get even more companies to apply for the instrument? It’s difficult to introduce it to businesses – we  need better guidelines nationally.
• Life Science companies are different. If the EU does not address the risks of meeting global challenges – who then will do that?

The luncheon was carried out as part of the Impact platform that Medtech4Health operates with Swelife.