Kuopio Health Board blog: Juha Palve
“A community has no purpose unless it works actively. There’s no use for a list of contacts if everyone just keeps operating in their own silos and niches.”
What are we doing now and how will it affect the future?
Impacts are a huge theme; after all, we must find solutions to major questions that will globally affect the entire humanity. How to stop biodiversity loss? How to safeguard the energy supply? How can we keep our planet viable and compatible with human life? In fact, it’s important that we now think about what we can currently achieve to bring a long-term positive effect that will benefit us and future generations.
A good or bad century?
From a brutally realistic perspective, the 2020s have been a bad decade. The pandemic and the war in Europe have shown that we cannot take peaceful development for granted, even in Europe. Thankfully, there is also hope on the horizon: We have learned a lot from the pandemic, have seen great leaps in pharmaceutical and vaccine development, and we’ll be much better prepared for the next pandemic. Meanwhile, the war in Europe is accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels. This is an inevitable development that we have been postponing for decades. These observations show that in every change and crisis also lies an opportunity to do things better.
Rising to the world-class with top areas of expertise
We obviously cannot solve all the world’s problems at Kuopio Health. But what we can do is to identify and determine the areas where we are already at the absolute top of the world or close to it and particularly influence these matters. It’s a global game we’re playing. Succeeding at the national level is not enough. We at the Kuopio Health Board have been determining our top areas of expertise. We’ll be able to rely on the top research in these areas. We should also pay attention to areas where new solutions can emerge at the interface of different fields of science. Startup companies play a key role in our innovation ecosystem. They may not be as badly affected by the recession that we are about to face compared to larger and more established companies. Startups are also key players in the promotion of innovations. As a result, it is important that we have a strong representation of startups in Kuopio Health. We must keep them actively engaged and also attract new startups to join our forces.
More than the sum of its parts
From the perspective of practical impacts, the work of Kuopio Health’s working groups gains emphasis. Our working groups on data and collaboration between RDI and business play a huge role for us. Impacts are a result of collaboration between research and companies. A community has no purpose unless it works actively. There’s no use for a list of contacts if everyone just keeps operating in their own silos and niches. At best, we can be more than the sum of our parts, but this will require all of us to participate actively. This will allow us to generate well-being in society, those very urgent things that will produce positive effects for decades to come.