HelseCampus Ullandhaug presented in Austin

Norway’s ambitious goal: 'The world’s best arena for health innovation in the future'. This was the theme of the “Health roundtable breakfast” where Thor Ole Gulsrud from IRIS presented HelseCampus Ullandhaug to Crown Prince Haakon of Norway and representatives from American and Norwegian health tech industry and academia.

The Health roundtable breakfast was organized by; City of Oslo, the Greater Stavanger Region, Norwegian General Consulate, Norway Health Tech and Norwegian Smart Care Cluster and took place on March 13th in House of Scandinavia in Austin/Texas. Thor Ole Gulsrud explains that Austin is the dynamic hotspot in the US at the moment.

"The city has a very dynamic environment for startups and has the highest population growth in the US for the 6th year in a row", Gulsrud says.

"Especially within the medical field they have been very visionary in Austin. The city has created an eco-system where a brand new hospital, medical research, medical education and medical innovation are strategically interlinked and steered towards identified needs. We want to learn from this, when we develop HelseCampus Ullandhaug in Stavanger", Gulsrud points out.

The Norwegian delegation made several presentations and discussed how Austin/Texas and Norway could innovate for common good and how to spin out university tech ideas and commercialize them fast. Innovation and quality as competitive edge when exporting to the US was also discussed as well as possibilities for a global innovation sharing network.

HelseCampus Ullandhaug
The HelseCampus Ullandhaug in Stavanger is now under development. The idea is to create a vital medical eco-system for research, education and innovation – a meeting point and arena for:

• Testing and simulations of health concepts
• Excellent education and training by simulation technology
• Simplification and professionalization of ideas/prototypes through incubators
• Development of common research- and innovation infrastructure (labs, tech equipment and IT)   
• Development and enhancement of medical businesses