Imagine that there is a researcher who wants to investigate the safety of health apps. At the same time as you yourself sit and think about whether that health app you are developing is secure enough? If you two were to meet, you both could benefit from each other.
For you who are an entrepreneur or part of a larger company, it can be challenging and time consuming to find this researcher. The researcher himself receives a lot of irrelevant inquiries, so the risk of missing that perfect match in all the noise of inquiries is unfortunately quite high.
As an entrepreneur, you may already know which researcher to turn to thanks to your established network. To network and building networks takes time, however, and even though it has become a buzzword, it almost becomes its own purpose in itself. This is based on creating awareness of where exactly you should turn you to get ahead. You may not see a need to take help from a person today but tomorrow you may have a different need.
So what happens if you, as an entrepreneur, are missing an essential part of your network or feel that it is not enough? It can be about making contact with public activities, researchers, finding business partners or the opportunity to reach future users. By creating an open innovation environment, there is the opportunity to find those pieces of the puzzle that are missing in your network.
Creating an open innovation environment may sound visionary. It becomes significantly more concrete when we create working groups in this environment, such as the preparation group. Here, representatives from Region Dalarna, Region Värmland, Karlstad municipality and Karlstad University meet regularly to discuss ideas that companies and entrepreneurs bring to DigitalWell.
As a process manager, the creation of an open innovation environment is partly about building up routines and communication channels, so that it will be easier to find the actor with whom you, as an entrepreneur, should be able to grow together. In this way, you as an entrepreneur can join the network we are building up and in this way supplement your own network.
At the same time, an open innovation environment means more than only a structured network. We want to make it easier for your need/idea to be taken forward to create collaborations. An open innovation environment can also include physical places where new ideas are created or existing products are developed thanks to different people meeting and daring to talk openly about opportunities and needs. In addition, we also want you who want to contribute with new, innovative digital health products and services to have the opportunity to test, develop and verify your idea to take it forward.
So you or your company have an idea, dare to talk about it, dare to network and dare to apply to structural networks.
Has you readyn now an idea that includes digital technology for health and is in need of reaching researchers, making contact in public activities, finding business partners, or is in need of reaching future users?
Feel free to contact me as process manager in DigitalWell. While waiting for you to hear from us, we continue to build on the network and to create a physical location for creativity!
/Malthe Vesström, process manager i DigitalWell
Malthe Vesström
Junior Process Leader Innovation
+46 (0)72 530 36 88
malthe.vesstrom@compare.se
The regional EU project DigitalWell is a collaboration between Compare, Karlstad Municipality, Region Värmland, Karlstad University, County Council in Dalarna, Region Dalarna, Friskvården in Värmland, Almi and Tieto. The project runs between 2017 – 2019.