Insights

Good news for Sports Tracker and Spinverse Innovation Mill: The Sports Tracker was spun off from Nokia with the Innovation Mill funding back in 2009. After some 25 million downloads globally, more than 2 million monthly active trackers from more than 200 countries around the world and with over 2 billion kilometers tracked, the company was acquired by Amer Sports.

Starting 14.4.2015, Spinverse Oy has undergone a name change to Spinverse Innovation Management Oy. The name change is a natural continuation of the company's growth, focusing on the internationalisation of Spinverse Innovation Management’s innovation services.

Sweden, Denmark and Finland were ranked as innovation leaders with respective ranks of first, second and fourth in the innovation scoreboard in the EU Framework Programme 7 (FP7) monitoring report.

Spinverse and EIRMA, the European Industrial Research Management Association, will launch the quest for Europe’s CTO of the Year 2015 on April 28th. The CTO of the Year Award is to highlight the role of the most prominent leaders of technology-based growth, promoting innovations to renew European industry and to upturn competitive advantage.

Jukka Lukkari wrote in the Tekniikka & Talous magazine on the 2^nd of April 2015 that EU funding is slipping through Finland’s fingers. It is indeed true that the renewed and more innovation-oriented contents of the EU Horizon 2020 funding program, as well as its accelerated processing speeds, have increased the application activity both in Finland and elsewhere in Europe. This has, in turn, led to even tougher competition than before and to somewhat lowered success rates in the EU area.

Spinverse has joined eight other European companies, research institutes and universities in the smart-MEMPHIS project. The objective of the project is to develop new, autonomous modules for energy harvesting. Energy harvesting systems that are developed within the smart-MEMPHIS project will have many applications ranging from implantable pacemakers to aircrafts. In cardiac pacemakers, the energy generated by heart beats will be used to power the implanted devices, thus bringing significant benefits to patients and healthcare professionals alike.

The October 2014 round of the SME instrument funding saw two Phase 2 grants being given to Finnish companies. The SME instrument, launched under the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Union, aims to support innovative Small- or Medium-sized Enterprises to gain competitive edge in their aspirations to accelerate the exploitation of their innovations, and to expand their business. According to the EU, the SME instrument is a simpler and more easily accessible funding scheme for SMEs in the Horizon 2020 programme. However, the competition is tight: less than 15 % of all the proposals get funded. “A successful application requires a strong focus on the business opportunity, high level of innovation, and a well written application”, says Dr. Pirjo Pasanen, a certified EU consultant from Spinverse.

The MATCH project funded by the European Union within the Horizon 2020 framework programme was initiated to strengthen and deepen the Alliance4Materials strategy with a further increased stakeholder network. Spinverse is a work package leader on communications and events section and is also participating in a work package related to the identification of success stories and analysis of the best practices.

Nine European companies and research institutes combine forces in the NanoPilot-project to create a pilot plant aimed at accelerating the development of nanomedicine by facilitating the production of small clinical batches under Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP). One of the first three nanopharmaceuticals chosen for production in the pilot plant is a promising intranasal HIV vaccine.