Royal Philips Electronics and VTT have opened an Innohub in the city of Espoo, close to Helsinki to generate innovative ideas and translate these into profitable businesses.
Focus areas for the Innohub are health, lifestyle and well-being.
People from different backgrounds and experiences will work closely together in a real-life setting that includes a hospital room, a nurse's station as well as a home environment.
The Innohub is a one-stop shop for the entire innovation process, from generating ideas, to concept development, prototyping and testing of products and services.
The real-life setting enables testing of products between various locations and stakeholders.
Both multinational companies and SMEs can engage with Innohub's experts and support services.
All Nordic and Baltic companies are able to tap into Philips and VTT experience for entire projects as well as additional specialist support in certain phases of a project that has already started.
The Innohub is situated in the Active Life Village (a non-profit company catalysing innovations).
This enables access to experts in other organisations in the same building as well to the whole region, supporting an open innovation environment concept.
The process steps will be executed in short-cycles.
The insights of the various specialists operating in the different stages of the process will be continuously fed back to the parties involved.
Innohub is focused on tangible deliverables that can be tested on performance.
By doing so, 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.
Innohub has already attracted interest and attention.
Current discussions concern projects on interconnectivity of products and services and a number of SMEs have shown interest in conducting part of their innovation work in the Innohub.
Companies can become members of the Innohub by paying a yearly contribution to obtain services or by commissioning ad-hoc projects.
User-centric development and end-user validation testing prior to product release will help the companies to reduce the time to market, development costs and field call rates.
