Editorial: International recognition of Medicon Valley

Reaching out, attracting talent, creating excellence – these six words are key for Medicon Valley Academy in all that we do. In the process of reaching out MVA has during the last month visited North America and Asia – to reach out for relations, partnerships, knowledge and talent.

Great interest for Medicon Valley at Bio 2007
In the beginning of May MVA participated in Bio 2007 in Boston. The agenda for our participation was two-fold: We wanted to brand Medicon Valley as a world class bioregion and we aimed to meet with potential partners for our Medicon Valley Ambassador Programme. Both aims were successfully achieved and we experienced great interest in Medicon Valley. Several times a day people from all over the world came to the Medicon Valley booth with questions about the region’s science and industry and expressed interest in developing new partnerships with players the region.

At the entrance of the Medicon Valley booth the region came into pictures with a continuous showing of our new branding movie “Medicon Valley 2016” (link). People stopped and looked with interest at what we have to offer in this region. For further information, we handed out folders with an introduction to the Medicon Valley region and a list of all life science companies specified by name, company profile and contact information. A short supplementary list gave an overview of the companies divided into categories such as biotech, diagnostic, CRO, drug delivery etc. The branding material was highly requested - in fact we had no folders left by the end of the convention!

Most importantly we talked with people and provided information and contacts on relevant persons or institutions in Medicon Valley. These branding and relation building activities are among our most important tasks as a cluster organisation - a service we are happy to provide for our members.

Building up relations in Asia
With the Medicon Valley Ambassador Programme MVA is reaching out to Asia – as well as other regions. The life science industry is developing rapidly in Asia and we witnesses a flourishing science and business environment. MVA wants to assist our members in building relationships and partnerships with Asian life science players and one of the means of achieving this is through cluster-to-cluster collaborations. With this goal in mind MVA has just toured Singapore, South Korea and China for ten days telling the Medicon Valley story and looking for potential partners for the Ambassador Programme. In all countries the opportunity to establish new science and business relations through our Ambassador Programme was met with great interest.

Adding up the meetings in Asia and at Bio 2007 we have over the last month had meetings about the Ambassador Programme with Seoul, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Beijing, Kobe, San Francisco, San José, North Carolina, Vancouver, Montreal and Basel. The meetings have been held with cluster organisations, companies and research institutions. The commitment for ambassador exchanges by our international partners is there – the challenge is now to provide the funding for these activities. We are work hard together with our international partners on this matter and we will provide you with a regular update in the editorials to follow.

Stig Jørgensen, Managing Director
sj@mva.org

Supporting the Medicon Valley Ambassador Programme