Nordic Innovation: Gave birth to and accelerated ScanBalt BioRegion

On the picture: Snapshot from a previous ScanBalt Forum in Gdansk

ScanBalt Forum 2017 takes place 18 of October in Tallinn – A Forum we believe presents a promising future for continued and strengthened Baltic Sea collaboration within health economy.

However, it should not be forgotten that the creation of ScanBalt BioRegion as a global hotspot for health economy would not have happened without the initial support from the Nordic Innovation; back in 2002 called the Nordic Industrial Fund.

Nordic Innovation is funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers, which is the official inter-governmental body for cooperation in the Nordic region. It supports projects and programmes to stimulate innovation and works to improve the framework conditions for Nordic markets and exports.

Visionary approach and accelerator

The dedicated efforts and support of Nordic Innovation brought ScanBalt BioRegion forward to become a sustainable entity with clear strategic goals and the capacity to pursue them.

Major investments by Nordic Innovation made it possible in a coordinated manner to mobilize and attract further regional and national investments together with EU-funding into cross-border collaboration promoting smart specialization.

Today the initial support have been multiplied more than 25 times by investments from public and private sources.

The development of ScanBalt BioRegion as a model for macro-regional collaboration throughout Europe was described in details in a report from May 2016 “Macro-Regional Development and the Health Economy: Practical Experiences, Models and Concepts for Macro-regional Collaboration between Regions and Clusters”.

The report can be downloaded here and was funded by the H2020-project DanuBalt.

Nordic collaboration as a catalyst for Baltic Sea region collaboration

The Nordic collaboration takes a very active and leading role in various aspects of the EU Baltic Sea region strategy. This is extremely positive and something quite unique for macro-regional collaboration throughout Europe.

It is only fair that we on the occasion of the upcoming ScanBalt Forum 18 of October in Tallinn pay respect to the Nordic collaboration and Nordic Innovation.

Without their initial investments, support and deep understanding it is not likely we would meet in 2017 and be looking forward to a promising future.

Peter Frank

General Secretary

ScanBalt