"Innovation has no gender" - EIT Health InnoStars is committed to supporting women leaders
"International Women's Day is a great opportunity to honor women of innovation. It is also a good time to raise awareness about the place of women in science. EIT Health is committed to promoting women's inclusion and empowerment in innovative endeavors in the field of Health. "
As the interest in gender equality has grown in recent years, people have begun to change and take steps towards a better balance. Today, more girls have access to education and continue their education worldwide, but there is still a long way to go to bridge the gender gap in science.
Within 2021 EIT Health organizes the Women Entrepreneurship Bootcamp training program. The purpose of the program is for companies to include women in their leadership team and to achieve the best possible results in their first business steps and in attracting investors. The seven-week program provides intensive training, mentoring and collaboration and networking opportunities in Barcelona (Spain), London (UK), Galway (Ireland) and Coimbra (Portugal). The organizers are particularly interested in start-ups, which are either run by women or have at least one woman in management. Applications can be submitted until March 16, 2021.
In recent years, women's entrepreneurship in Greece is consolidating its presence more and more. The contribution of women in economic activity is increasing, new forms of entrepreneurship are emerging, with women in many cases giving a potential presence. These new forms of women entrepreneurship find their expression through start-ups, cooperatives, social enterprises and actions.
The National Documentation Center (EKT), a pole of EIT Health in Greece, actively supports, through a series of activities and actions, the participation of women in innovation. At the statistical level, it monitors and records on an annual basis the position of women in Research and Development activities. As part of EIT Health activities, the EKT has supported many start-ups run by women scientists, entrepreneurs and experts.
The female perspective on health innovations is growing significantly. For example, Dr. Vassilia Chatzistergiou is BookingClinic's Medical Content & Communication Manager. The company is among the 21 companies from all over Europe selected through the EIT Health Headstart 2020 Program because they represent innovative solutions in the field of Health. Companies receive financing, business support and skills development guidance to accelerate the development and marketing of innovative products and services.
Read the full article here.
In a second interview on In.gr about start-ups in Greece and EIT Health actions leading to solutions for Covid 19, George Megas referred to the BookingClinic.com platform.
George Megas is the National Contact Point for Information & Telecommunication Technologies (ICT) and Future & Emerging Technologies (FET / EIC) on Horizon 2020 and coordinator of the EIT Health HUB for Greece at the National Documentation & Electronic Content Center (EKT) . He is also a consultant for innovation and technology transfer to the largest business support and innovation network in the world, the Enterprise Europe Network, whose coordinator for Greece is the EKT.
“Would you like to give us typical examples of startups that were "accelerated" through the program? What's more, which of them had and still have an interesting route?”
In 2017 2 startups passed to the final phase of the Innostars awards program receiving a small amount of money as well as training and hatching services. In 2018 the startups that made it to the final of the EIT health Innostars became 5 including the companies, BookingClinic, Eugonia clinic, Insybio, Tendertec and Exisom. These companies received support from the Pedro Nunes Institute (IPN) in Portugal. These companies may not have reached the final in the first year but the story continued in the following years with success as we will see below.
In 2020 EIT Health "launched" the Headstart program again focusing on a cohort of companies that would present solutions to deal with the pandemic, in which the company Booking Clinic was selected and received 50,000 euros, the same year RT Safe reached its final European Health Catapult and Collaborate Cloud were selected as the most capable to solve the challenge set by AMGEN in the StartupMeetsPharma program and thus became one of the winners of the competition. This is how we see the multiple successes but also the fact that the maturation and the support of the companies is a continuous process for some startups including Booking Clinic, Eugonia, RTSafe etc.
Read the full article here.
