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Today’s business environment is changing rapidly. Industry boundaries are blurring, and digitalization is enabling new business models. In the rapidly changing environment innovation is increasingly open, companies are actively seeking to collaboration and forming ecosystem partnerships in order to renew themselves and sustain competitiveness.
Research and development used to be more of an in-house activity within companies, but organisations today understand the value of joining forces in innovation processes and forming ecosystems around them.
EU is funding a large research consortia project to create a printed electronics platform from cellulose to replace plastic, and Finnish key players in the field VTT, Aalto University and Spinverse, are in on the action. INNPAPER, now half a year running, is fully backed by EU-funding as a so called RIA research project (Research and Innovation Action).
City of Espoo received the 2018 Intelligent Community of the Year award given by the Intelligent Community Forum at its Global Summit in London June 6, 2018. Espoo was honored in its first year as a competitor in the program after a year-long evaluation that included a quantitative analysis of extensive data, site inspections by the Intelligent Community Forum and votes from an international jury made up of experts from around the world.
From Aalto the program will be led by Prof. Orlando Rojas & Dr. Maryam Borghei, in Biobased Colloids and Materials group (BicMat) from the Department of Bioproducts and Biosystems (Bio2).
Allergies and asthma affect at least a quarter of the population. While often harmless, an increasing number of people suffer from severe allergies, resulting in more than 300.000 avoidable deaths per year. The WHO therefore declared allergy a major health problem of the 21st century. Currently, medical practitioners must pre-select very few allergens for in-vitro testing, based on prior anamnesis, which often results in false or incomplete diagnosis. There is no cost-efficient technology to improve the quality of diagnosis to an optimal level for patient-tailored and evidence-based treatment. The fast-growing segment of molecular diagnostic tests requires a new generation of assays and laboratory automation.
MetGen's CTO, Matti Heikkilä, and Laura Koponen, Managing Director of Spinverse were on Finnish national tv, Huomenta Suomi, discussing the grand vision: wood to replace oil. In practice wood will be used to produced products, which are currently made from oil, starting with packaging materials. Moreover, the SWEETWOODS project, a consortium of nice European companies, has received 21M€ of EU-funding with the aim of producing wood-based biomaterials for the first time on an industrial scale. These wood-based materials can be used to replace plastic in various everyday applications.
Innovation is proven to be the single most efficient way to encourage growth and renewal. Should Finland once again be made the spearhead of innovation all others compare themselves to?
The bi-annual CTO Forum spring event was held on 19th of March at restaurant Palace. This time the focus of the event was on Finland 4.0 - how to increase the R&D expenditure of GDP to 4.0%.
Vesa Varjonen, Vice President of Research and Technology at Planmeca and Matti Heikkilä, CTO of MetGen have been chosen as CTOs of the Year 2018. The jury consisting of leading Finnish technology influencers emphasized the significant role of the awarded CTOS on renewal of the industry. The CTO of the Year Awards are given by Spinverse together with Technology Industries of Finland and Business Finland to highlight the importance of Chief Technology Officers work on the future competitiveness of Finnish industries.