While Europe is rich in invention, too few innovations are manufactured here or are accessible to European patients. Breakthroughs born in Europe’s universities and research hospitals often scale in the US or Asia long before they gain traction at home.
Policymakers have proposed many solutions to this stubborn problem, from simplifying regulation to expanding EU-level funding programmes. However, business leaders have voiced frustration that these reforms aren’t filtering through.
A recent survey by the European Round Table for Industry (ERT) found that 76% of Europe’s top chief executives reported “no impact” from EU actions linked to the influential Draghi report, a major review by Mario Draghi, former president of the European Central Bank, on how Europe can restore its global competitiveness.
EIT Health — part of the EU-funded European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) — is acutely aware of the challenges innovators face. It brings together industry leaders, academics, healthcare providers and investors to help innovations move from research to real world use, and has a network spanning the European health ecosystem.
It also has experience launching more than 130 products and expertise that has supported nearly 3,000 startups and scale ups since 2016, so understands the need for practical support for startups from development to market.
Graham Armitage, director of stakeholder relations and UK Ireland managing director at EIT Health, understands these issues first hand.
“Innovators and startups struggle to access vital resources and information to successfully complete the innovation process from idea to scale,” he says. Without the right network of partners, “critical steps may be missed in the regulatory process,” and prototypes may require costly rework.
The lesson from Catalonia: Networks and collaboration are vital to success
The benefits of strong collaboration between innovators, public bodies, academia and industry are underlined by Catalonia, an autonomous region in the north of Spain.
Catalonia has around 155 companies applying AI to healthcare, over 100 of them startups or scaleups, which have raised a record €350m.
Rossana Alessandrello, director of value based procurement at Catalonia’s Agency for Health Quality and Assessment (AQuAS), argues that Catalonia’s emergence as one of Europe’s most productive health innovation ecosystems is a product of its broad culture of “continuous exchange” between industry, academia, education and health systems.
Alessandrello’s work sits between innovation and adoption, where health systems, together with their healthcare delivery organisation, decide what to buy, test or scale.
She says innovators need to design their research and medical devices with “the value to the patients and their healthcare systems in mind from the start”. She adds: “This can only happen in conversation with patients, clinicians, healthcare delivery organisations and payers”.
The importance of launching a single product across multiple markets
Innovators need to think about customers early and across multiple markets.
“Startups should think internationally from the start, exploring the different needs, constraints and opportunities, and shaping their solutions and go-to-market plans accordingly,” Armitage says.
EIT Health continues to focus on this with tangible results. A recent independent evaluation by the European Commission found that “substantial EU added value” comes from EIT Health’s network and its ability to foster collaboration across Europe and between those both inside and outside healthcare. It has supported 114 multi-country consortia, each involving partners from an average of four European countries.
Growing demand for reform
The challenge of launching a single product across multiple markets remains a major concern for Europe’s health innovation community. The same studies of a product’s impact may be rejected in Germany but accepted in France, while in other countries no formal evaluation pathway exists at all.
Startup association France Digitale has launched a petition calling for a unified EU framework for evaluating digital innovation. Now signed by more than 100 leaders, the petition draws heavily on a paper by the European Taskforce for DMDs, coordinated by EIT Health, which sets out a more aligned way for countries to buy digital health tools.
The petition reflects a growing demand for practical reforms that help innovators move from promising pilots to real system use. Catalonia, for example, has developed structures to help promising innovations move into real services, such as the Catalan Health System Innovation Access Programme (PASS), a central registry that connects new medical devices, digital tools and therapies with decision makers to streamline adoption.
The appetite for cross border collaboration is also strong among customers. Alessandrello says such partnerships can help “increase standardisation, interoperability and future commercialisation, and increase the likelihood that solutions can be deployed in our own system”.
Education, investment and the pathway to real world impact
Funding creates another barrier for European innovators. Many health startups begin with public grants but they need a different skillset to convince investors to back their prototype to turn into a product. Scientists must show they can build a viable business, not just a breakthrough idea.
Europe offers co-investment mechanisms, but they often require private matched funding.
Armitage says: “These can make investment more attractive for the private investor, but innovators will still need the skills and knowledge to successfully approach these investors.”
This is where EIT Health’s role as an educator and mentor becomes increasingly significant. Its entrepreneurship work was highlighted in the European Commission’s Horizon Europe mid-term evaluation for “providing both expertise and synergies to support business creation and attract significant investments.”
The impact is clear: in 2017, EIT Health-supported ventures attracted €27.9m in investment; by 2022, that figure had risen to €408.7m.
EIT Health also has a growing portfolio of training programmes supporting Europe’s digital transition. Across these programmes, 67% of participants reported improved innovation skills, 60% launched new R&D activities and 40% enhanced products or services. In total, more than 70k students, healthcare professionals and entrepreneurs have been trained through EIT Health programmes.
But education and funding only deliver impact when innovators build broad networks. As Armitage puts it: “the real skill innovators need is the ability to build relationships with collaborators, friends and supporters from a wide range of backgrounds.”
That ability is what turns promising science into scalable solutions, and ultimately what will determine whether Europe’s deep scientific strength becomes real health innovation, not just in Catalonia but across the continent.
