Take aways from the #Medica2016

Just barely recovered from the impressions of the TCI Global conference last week we had an entrepeneurial trip to the Medica this week. Coming in late Monday night around midnight we had a filled program for Tuesday and Wednesday.

Some 30 entrepeneurs and other representatives of Health Valley’ s ecosystem followed to Düsseldorf to visit one of the largest fairs in Healthcare that I am aware of. I will have to look up the statistics but I heard of some 5000 exhibitors on the massive grounds of the Düsseldorf Messe.

 

On Tuesday we had a visit to the stand of Singapore. On Wednesday we visited the Spain pavillion amongst others. Allthough these visits are great and you can exchange a lot of information, it is really the interaction with the accompanying entrepeneurs that strike me the most. It is so inspiring to talk about their companies, the possibilities they see for healthcare in general and the innovations in particular.

After visits to the fair it’s back by bus to the borough of Neuss where we are staying in a hotelboat. (That’ s first for me. Fun to stay at. During the evening I have time to catch up with my colleague since we have so many meetings at different places it felt like we hadn’t seen eachother for a long time. So basically we finally had time to (literally) sit down and talk through some new ideas and concepts that we would like to try with the cluster. (These new ideas to some extent inspired by last week’s conference off course)

So it has been an inspiring week last week for the cluster development and this week for the entrepeneurial spirit. What I discovered during TCI Global is the fact that collaboration for the network is just as important as it is for the entrepeneurs. But maybe equally difficult. Working together in clusters means you have to share thoughts and ideas and not be afraid for competiveness. A good deal of trust is necessary for collaboration. And this is off course also the challenges before this is working well. You and the partner have to be in good contact for a more extensive period of time in order to build trust and mutual understanding. Therefor the socializing aspect of such a conference is much more important than the technology or innovation on display so to speak.

 

One interesting point for instance on the socializing is the incident that happened during Tuesday evening at the bar of the ship. We came back from dinner in the Alt Stadt of Düsseldorf. Discussing the day we came into contact with one of the company directors telling how he recently had visited one of our events and didn’t like it. Instead of feeling insulted I was curious to find out what had happened. I later thought how great it was to hear somebody tell about what he didn’t like and what an opportunity to learn for me and my colleague this was. Learning from what he had missed in the event or what went wrong would give us the opportunity to improve on our next mission. So we engaged in the conversation asking him more and more questions on what went wrong for him. It was a great evening altogether.

Basically this experience resonated with my positive feeling from last weeks event where there was a mutual trust present in the company to exchange thought and ideas on how to improve things. In this case the management of clusters in order to maximize the profit members and partners from the triple helix could derive from it. So yea, let’s keep meeting eachother in this way. Building trust and succesful experiences in sharing knowledge and best practices from our professional life.