Editorial:

Medicon Valley Alliance looks ahead

Medicon Valley Alliance has served as the organising capacity of Medicon Valley since the organisation was founded 10 ten years ago. Medicon Valley Alliance (MVA) has been focused on the region's development with a strong commitment to develop cross border synergies between private and public stakeholders, to achieve critical mass within the region's core competences and to brand the region as a world class and competitive life science cluster.

In the decade to come, MVA will prioritise it's resources on regional development through many different local initiatives, and will also work to secure Medicon Valley a position as a global player in the premiere league of life science clusters.

Future challenges - and solutions

The most important challenge for Medicon Valley in the years to come will be to attract sufficient talent within science and business to secure the continuous growth and maturation of the region. Many companies founded in the late 1990-ties have now reached a stage of maturity, where their product pipeline has reached late stage development and will hopefully be launched onto the market in the near future. If we do not succeed in making our region attractive to foreign talent, companies will have to redirect their R&D activities from Medicon Valley to where the talent exists.

We must improve the region's competitive position. Medicon Valley is only one life science cluster among at least 250 others. Medicon Valley must be on top of everyone's mind when key business decisions are made. This ambitious goal can only be achieved through an efficient international branding of the region's attributes as a prerequisite for entering into productive cluster-to-cluster collaborations. The branding must be based on an in-depth knowledge and understanding of the region's strengths and weaknesses, it's competences as well as it's opportunities with a clear understanding of how they relate to each other.

For this purpose the upcoming Medicon Valley Dashboard will act as an online point of entry to Medicon Valley, using state of the art information technologies. The portal will be launched in the summer of 2008 and will present an overview of key information on the public and private players in Medicon Valley. The Dashboard will not only give the user an efficient tool to identify the right partner in the region, it will also provide potential partners with an aggregated and updated overview of the many opportunities that exist, i.e. development pipeline, available jobs, service providers, educational opportunities etc.

The Medicon Valley Life Science Ambassador Programme is another MVA initiative who's aim is to improve Medicon Valley's international outreach. The ambition for the Ambassador Programme is to enter into close collaborations with ten of the most important life science clusters around the world from the Far East, Europe and North America. The first collaboration agreements are in place with the Kobe-Kansai cluster in Japan and the cluster in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Within the next 4-5 years MVA will host 10 life science ambassadors in it's offices. The ambassadors will meet in the morning and work together throughout the day and will constantly strive to create win-win opportunities not only between Medicon Valley players and their counterparts in other clusters, but also between stakeholders in two or more of the other foreign regions.

All of these initiatives from MVA are very ambitious and call for a significant financial support from the public and private stakeholders in Medicon Valley - but we are convinced that it can be done. The three administrative regions in Medicon Valley together with some of the largest corporations have already expressed their support through allocation of financial resources to the Ambassador Programme. MVA's ambition is to have secured the financial platform for the first three years of the programme by Christmas 2007.

Reaching out, attracting talent, creating excellence

MVA has taken some important steps to help position Medicon Valley among the five most attractive life science regions in the world. This leads us closer to a realisation of the vision for Medicon Valley, which was formulated in 2001 by a large group of stakeholders. Clustering life science in Medicon Valley is not an easy task, but the last 10 years' achievements have shown us that it can be done - and we will strive to do it even better. In this process, your support as an MVA member is of crucial importance. MVA is happy to mark our 10-year jubilee as a member organisation and we look forward to having you accompany us on the challenging adventure of creating a top five world-class life science cluster.

Please join us in our work -
reaching out, attracting talent, creating excellence.

Kind regards,

Stig Jørgensen
Managing Director
sj@mva.org