We welcome our new Eurasanté Hauts-de-France Health Ecosystem! Read the interview with its ecosystem coordinator

We are pleased to welcome the Eurasanté Hauts-de-France Health Ecosystem. Read the interesting interview with Elodie Schutz, European Project Manager at Eurasanté.

Who are the key stakeholders and what are the main objectives of your ecosystem?

For more than 20 years, Eurasanté has been supporting the Northern France region ecosystems of researchers, project leaders and companies from the health and nutrition sector in their research, creation, and activity development projects.

The northern France health and nutrition sector is rich with 1,100 companies employing 32,000 people in the biotech / pharma, medtech, specialized services and e-health sectors. The sector includes large groups that are world leaders, as well as a substantial network of SMEs, who collaborate with a large network of research, academic and healthcare institutions. The health sector is a key element of the regional economy, with €12,5 billion turnover. The companies in this sector interact with a rich network of research institutions among the most fertile in France with 80 laboratories, 4,000 public and private researchers, focused on major public health themes: cancer, cardio-metabolic diseases, neurodegenerative pathologies, chronic bowel disease (MICI).

As an ecosystem manager, our missions are to:

• Promote research: Foster technology transfer and collaborative projects, help the emergence of start-ups and spin-offs.
• Stimulate the creation of start-ups thanks to 3 programs – The Eurasanté Bio Incubator (biotech, medtech, e-health) Euralimentaire Incubator (foodtech) and Eurasénior Incubator (healthy ageing, silver economy).
• Support companies, researchers and innovative projects in the development of their activities thanks to a range of services and expertise, and through the Eurasanté BioAccelerator + large activity in european projects (15 current European projects involving Eurasante as leader or partner)
• Promote Northern France Region, support and attract companies looking to develop on the European healthcare market.
• Organize business conventions: create the best conditions for companies and researchers meet. We organize yearly 4 European business convention: MedFIT (medtech, diagnostic, e-health), BioFIT (biotech, pharma), NutrEvent (Food, feed, nutrition and health) and AgeingFit (healthy ageing innovations).

Why did you join the ECHAlliance Network of Ecosystems?

• Introduce Eurasanté’s Northern France Regional Ecosystem to ECHAlliance members and other ecosystems.
• Connect and find partners to collaborate with. 
• Share our services, news, call for projects and business conventions.
• Strengthen our ecosystem’s attractiveness.
• Learn about the ECHAlliance’s ecosystems’ activities.

Who is missing from your ecosystem in terms of stakeholders? 

We are supporting an innovative ecosystem and we always need to meet and connect with stakeholders (industries, research, care, investment, training, …) from Europe and beyond to further develop our ecosystem and attract new members. Our ecosystem is very active at the European level supported by Eurasanté’s European Project Team dedicated to project engineering and monitoring, which I am part of,  and experience of +15 years of managing EU projects. We are either looking for organisations willing to partner with us to apply to EU calls for project or to partner with our ecosystem members.