02 May Interview with HIVE
FreshBlood and Center for Health Innovation – HIVE have been collaborating on some great projects and we wanted to tell you more about what we do together. We had a talk with Naomi Bonțidean, Operations Manager HIVE.
Can you tell us more about HIVE and its projects?
The Center for Health Innovation HIVE (Babes Bolyai University) strives to be a stimulating environment for the healthcare initiative, supporting research and innovation in the field and creating a community of health innovators. HIVE designs events to empower innovators and entrepreneurs to develop innovative solutions to the biggest healthcare challenges. Top students, developers, designers, entrepreneurs and thinkers are joining the events and becoming part of a community which promotes and encourages health innovation. The mission of the HIVE Center is to create a community of health innovators to address the biggest healthcare challenges.
In the last 4 years, The Center for Health Innovation HIVE organized 7 relevant Innovation Events, in collaboration with EIT Health and other remarkable partners from the Health Innovation Sphere. The events started as local projects and went on becoming international events. From the last to the first events organized: Emergency medicine, emergencies and resilience Hackathon (November 2021, Partners: Romania Tech Nation, BCR Innov X, ATOS) Telemedicine Hackathon (September 2021, partner: TELIOS Care) e-Mental Health Hackathon (March 2021, partner: Wolfpack Digital) EITHealth Innovation Days 2021, EITHealth Innovation Days 2020, EITHealth Innovation Days 2019, EITHealth Innovation Days 2018.
How does HIVE help the health innovators?
The events organized by HIVE are bringing together innovative minds, eager to work on something that they are passionate about and gives them access to a network that is designed to be a safe space for driven, resilient, open-minded, and proactive individuals to share and support each other’s thoughts, ideas and work. Through the mentorship and evaluation they are provided with during the events, HIVE empowers them to develop ingenious ideas that can become successful projects or even businesses.
How can a student passionate about health innovation start building a start-up? And how cand HIVE help?
In order to start building a start-up, students need to pilot their project idea developed after getting to know the right entrepreneurial cycle of starting a business. Through the training, guidance and evaluation students are offered when joining a HIVE event, they are introduced to the entrepreneurial mindsets, toolsets, and skill sets as used in startups globally.
How is the community of health innovators in Romania? What does it need?
Innovators need connections, support and aspirations, and we see every year an increase of motivation, competitiveness and project maturity. The road is long, but progress is already significant, and we believe that HIVE has its role.
Can you tell us more about the hackathons organized by HIVE?( the purpose, the results, the partners, etc)
In the last 4 years, The Center for Health Innovation HIVE organized 7 relevant Innovation Events.
As part of the EITHealth Innovation Day Events, organized in collaboration with EIT Health, we had 4 Hackathons on the following topics: 2018- Tackling real-life social & health challenges by NGOs in Cluj-Napoca, 2019- Bringing care home (Home care service and systems area), 2020- Child cancer care, 2021- Increasing urban physical activity. Among collaborations with the private sector partners we must also mention:
“e-Mental Health Hackathon” 2021 – Event in collaboration with Wolfpack Digital, aiming to inspire students interested in innovating approaches to mental health issues.
“Telemedicine Hackathon 2021 – Event in collaboration with Telios Care aiming to create multidisciplinary teams to use their expertise to tackle health problems and propose innovative solutions involving telemedicine.
“Emergency Medicine, Emergencies and Resilience Hackathon ” 2021 -Event marking a national premiere, representing the first Hackathon bringing together the public sector, represented by DSU/SMURD, and the private sector, through Romania Tech Nation and BCR INNOVX.
The results of the events HIVE is providing are improving health across communities through innovative digital solutions provided by the community of health innovators.
How is the collaboration between HIVE and FreshBlood?
In the last 4 years, the collaboration between HIVE and Freshblood has grown and benefited both partners, which managed to bring a unique set of knowledge and skills to the table, completing each other’s needs and expectations. HIVE manages the local ecosystem and academia interactions and Freshblood opens the doors to the international ecosystem and startups network.
The common objectives lead us to collaborate not only with the purpose of building an innovators community but also to develop and implement bigger projects, the most important of them being HUBvantage- the (first) virtual (then physical) Healthtech Hub, for Healthcare Startups Founders and interested stakeholders from Romania/Moldova then Eastern Europe in which they will find support and solutions to their challenges and grow their businesses in a fast and sustainable way.
What are your plans for 2022?
Besides continuing to organize Hackathons, the biggest projects we are designing for 2022 are
Global StartupCities eHealth Program 2022 and HUBvantage.
Global StartupCities eHealth Program is a multi-stage EU eHealth start-ups competition that is a chapter of the Global StartupCity Cluj-Napoca affiliated with the Center for Health Innovation HIVE and it’s designed to help early stage health innovation entrepreneurs transform their ideas into world changing companies, faster and smarter.
Participants will have a unique opportunity to grow their business skills and global network through carefully designed training, mentoring sessions and evaluation stages. Start-ups who successfully complete the program will be able to take their venture to the next level!
The program includes 4 different stages the startups must get through in order to win the prize: 1-year mentoring by a high-profile IT Company offering tech support and 1-year support for pilot and validation within the healthcare system.
With HUBvantage, we want to build a safe space where startup founders can have access to each other by regular interactions in which they could identify potential synergies and collaborations. As a healthtech founder it is essential to have good collaborations with healthcare professionals in order to better understand the domain needs. Hence, in this hub, our main purpose is to facilitate the connection between startup founders and healthcare professionals and help them work together.
We want to bring value to healthcare professionals by facilitating the connections between them and other innovative interested people and helping them find useful materials for scientific publications. In HUBvantage, we want to help startup founders attract investments and scale up their businesses by giving them access to mentors with different backgrounds and facilitating connections with interested investors.