Collaboration between Aalto University and HUS will create more innovations and new types of expertise

The collaboration of the university hospital and Aalto University has been fertile. Examples of recent success stories include entrepreneurship and product development accelerators Biodesign Finland and Spark as well as BioMag, a joint research laboratory for biomagnetic methods managed jointly by the University of Helsinki, Aalto University and HUS. Collaboration has also been carried out in the development of the virtual hospital terveyskylä.fi and in many thesis projects every year. The predecessor organisations of HUS and Aalto were effectively in continuous collaboration since the 1970s. The current collaboration is part of the Health Capital Helsinki alliance, which involves several organisations from the Helsinki Metropolitan Area.

On Monday 2 September, Juha Tuominen, CEO of HUS, and Ilkka Niemelä, President of Aalto University, signed a collaboration contract that will facilitate all forms of collaboration from theses to innovation projects and management education. At the signing event, the contracting parties stated that the field of health and wellbeing is important to Aalto University and that HUS gladly cooperates with experts in technology as the healthcare sector must constantly build on technological development opportunities.

Markus Mäkelä and Anne Pitkäranta, the leaders coordinating the collaboration, discussed the expectations and objectives for the deepening cooperation.

”Otaniemi, the most significant innovation district in the Nordic countries, and Meilahti, Finland’s most significant centre of expertise in specialised medical care will definitely benefit from each other and be of use to Finland and the world as a whole. This may sound clichéd, but let’s look at innovations that are already widely used, such as neurological imaging and treatment technologies or advanced implant biomaterials”, said Markus Mäkelä, Executive in Residence at Aalto University.

At Aalto, the contract is expected to create new synergic relationships and to promote collaborative research and innovations. For HUS, the collaboration will increase the opportunities to innovate, develop work processes and participate in training offered by Aalto University.

“By combining strong expertise in medicine, nursing science and other health sciences with research in technology, management and design and the organization of innovation processes, we aim to achieve more impactful research results and more effective generation of commercialized inventions, which ultimately translate into better patient care”, added Anne Pitkäranta, Research Director of HUS.