Finland’s VTT Development Centre and Royal Philips Electronics have opened an InnoHub in Espoo, near Helsinki to translate innovative ideas into profitable businesses. The Innohub will focus on health, lifestyle and wellbeing.
The InnoHub is designed to be a one-stop shop for the innovation process, from generating ideas, to concept development, prototyping and testing of products and services. Multinational companies and SMEs from Nordic and Baltic countries can engage with InnoHub’s experts and support services.
The innovation process steps will be executed in short-cycles. The insights of the various specialists operating in the different stages of the innovation process will be continuously fed back to the parties involved. InnoHub is focused on tangible deliverables that can be tested on their performance. By doing so, says VTT, every specialist will be challenged to show the added value of his or her contribution, to confront others with their own constraints, and to cope with the limitations of others. This kind of result-oriented approach also leads to respect for each others’ disciplines in a learning organisation, says VTT.
In the first InnoHub project student teams compete in creating applications from Intellectual Property owned by VTT. Five parallel student teams from the Helsinki University of Technology TKK and University of Art and Design Helsinki will be competing in creating prototypes. The teams are led by Prof. Lauri Repokari from the Helsinki University of Technology.
The first Philips InnoHub was founded in Singapore in 2004. Philips Applied Technologies decided to establish its second InnoHub in the Helsinki region as one of the world’s innovation hotspots offering business and research activities in the fields of well-being and healthcare – important focus areas for Philips as well as for the Finnish government.
“We have selected VTT as a preferred partner because of its extended network in the Nordic and Baltic countries, and its reputation as a respected R&D partner,” says Senior Innovation Consultant Rob Kommeren from Philips Applied Technologies.
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