Nordic SPARK programs have had years of successful collaboration in boosting emergence of new cool solutions in health tech and life science field. Collaboration in mentoring of the projects started few years ago, and we are building now the next level joint efforts.

During the past few years, we have already been building and enabling online webinar series and “Innovators café” events with our European program network. The First jointly organized physical event was in September 2022 at Nordic Life Science Days in Malmö (SWE) where SPARK Finland, SPARK Norway and SPARK Denmark had one hour fireside chat on a central stage. That was a great way to introduce Nordic program network for Nordic audience. The next one was in November 2022 at Nordic SPARK Showcase Event in Helsinki—just before SLUSH event. It was a fantastic way of celebrating SPARKees (our projects) and our alumni with our friends, enablers, supporters and other stakeholders.

The third major joint activity is the upcoming Silicon Valley tour of Nordic SPARK programs. We have in total 20 participants from SPARK Finland and SPARK Norway having numerous meetings with academic organizations, programs, and laboratories in Stanford and UCSF ecosystems. We also have meetings with business, finance and tech transfer professionals. One of the key reasons for the tour is that we are jointly attending Stanford Drug Discovery Symposium 2023 in which we are also supporters for the event. For next year, we are looking forward to having participants also from the Danish program.

This is one example how the Nordic program network wants to improve the impact of SPARK projects and same time bring our programs, projects and emerging startups to exist for the wider audiences around the world.

We are looking forward exciting week in San Francisco Bay Area!