For the 4th Interregional Learning Workshop, the hosts, Council of Tampere Region, organized a study visit mainly focused on Open Innovation Platforms (OIPs), known for their physical and digital environment with the ability to boost creativity and collaboration through communities with entrepreneurial individuals at the center.
The first visit was to the Tampere Startup Hub, which is a community built by startups for startups, with office spaces in the heart of Tampere, which works together to help their members becoming global success stories. Most of the current startups located now in Startup Hub were previously based in New Factory and grew in their incubator into a strong startup community. Now they want to take it to the next level and become a leading innovation platform in Finland and to be an essential part of smart Tampere ecosystem.
After Tampere Startup Hub, followed the presentation of the Demola Network. Demola is part of a bigger entity – New Factory which is an innovation center and startup incubator, and aims to bring project partners, universities and multidisciplinary student teams together to solve real-world challenges. The results are concepts, demonstrations and prototypes that show the real value and can be used e.g. as sales support, internal decision-making support or starting point for subcontracting work.
Demola innovation process is open for all types of Project Partners (companies from startups to corporations, municipalities, associations). Any Intellectual property rights resulting from this project is owned by the student teams. At the Tampere location Demola has generated license fees of 2M Euro amount. In addition there are also “facilitation fees” which are by far lower than the license fees.
For the universities Demola is offering services in the field of trend scanning for the next 5 to 10 years. Founded in 2008 in Tampere, Finland, currently Demola operates in 13 different locations worldwide.
The last visit took place in Tampere Health Hub, a health sector community, meeting place, innovation platform and joint development environment. In this case of OIP, the participants are health-sector companies, clinicians, researchers and developers, together with consumers and end-users. Many of the operators are already nearby; the HealthHUB is located on the Kauppi Medical Campus, which is a growing center for medical research and healthcare, health technology and wellness.
