We speak with Annemarie Munk Riis, CEO of Innovation District Copenhagen, about its world-leading environment, Europe’s scale-up problem, and why innovation cannot happen inside a single laboratory. It needs an entire ecosystem.
What does it take to create an environment where researchers feel encouraged not only to publish discoveries, but also to commercialise them?
Culture – where academics and clinicians are encouraged to be open to the innovation potential of the discoveries they make and are educated in the advantages of combining applied and fundamental research.
Incentives – ultimately, researchers do what the career system rewards. As long as tenure, promotion and grants are decided almost exclusively on publications, commercialisation will remain a hobby for the unusually motivated. Recognising spinouts, patents and industry collaboration in academic career tracks would change behaviour faster than any support programme.
Support – where access to IP protection, business developers, commercial scouting and entrepreneurial training is abundant and easy.
Money – for pre-seed, seed, series A, B, C and, crucially, for scaling. This is where Europe is weakest, and I will return to it.
Proximity – and all of it has to happen somewhere. Commercialisation is a contact sport. It happens when a researcher, a clinician and an entrepreneur run into each other repeatedly, it is not enough to meet at an annual conference. That requires physical space in the district and space is currently our single hardest constraint. Luckily, in IDC we now have access to space and will be building labs and office space.
Which fields do you believe have the greatest potential to make Innovation District Copenhagen an international powerhouse for health innovation?
The combination is what will set us apart: local quantum and AI expertise applied to our life science strongholds. Very few places in the world have both at world-class level within two square kilometres. Quantum sensing alone has the potential to transform diagnostics, and it is being developed a few hundred metres from the hospitals that would use it.
The underlying research excellence is there. The district is home to world-leading environments in cancer, bacteriology, protein bioinformatics, diabetes and fundamental metabolism, while our quantum technology and AI research is at the very forefront.
But scientific excellence alone does not do it. What really sets our district apart is that the entire health and care value chain is present in our geography and collaborating to improve conditions for innovators and entrepreneurs.
We have the City of Copenhagen, which carries political responsibility for the health and welfare of more than a million citizens. The city is increasingly collaborating with Rigshospitalet, the leading research hospital, and Bispebjerg, the leading general hospital. Those hospitals are in turn collaborating ever more closely with the University of Copenhagen, which educates doctors and researchers; University College Copenhagen, which educates nurses and healthcare personnel; and DTU, which educates engineers. Behind them stand the industry organisations, five major funding bodies and the Danish state.
Very few places in the world have the payer, the hospitals, the universities, the funders and the companies within walking distance of each other and they are actually talking to each other.
What is the secret ingredient that turns a collection of institutions into a place where innovation happens?
Trust! Our organisation is a forum for open and frank discussion between institutions that are, in other respects, competitors for talent, funding and attention.
Out of those conversations has grown an unwritten rule: an initiative should benefit more than one member, and it should never come at the expense of another. Individual organisations of course still have their own agendas that is legitimate. But there is an ever-increasing understanding that in a district this dense, what is good for one member is usually good for the rest.
That rule is why a hospital will share a lead with a university, and why a university will point a startup towards a competitor’s facility. It is not written into any contract.
When it comes to turning research into global companies, what can Europe learn from innovation ecosystems in the US and Asia?
Europe does not have a startup problem. We have a scale-up problem.
Look at BioInnovation Institute (BII), right here in the district: it produces a steady stream of excellent, well-run, scientifically strong startups. That part of the machine works. The problem comes later. When those companies need to raise the rounds that turn a promising biotech into a global company, the capital is not there at the size and speed required and too often the company, the jobs and the eventual value move to Boston or the Bay Area in the US. We are, in effect, running a highly efficient incubator for other people’s economies.
So what can we learn?
First, Europe needs a true common market: uniform regulation, a joint capital market, and a simple, universal incorporation mechanism. Thankfully, much of this is under way, and our organisation has worked actively to push for these changes.
Second, Europe needs to convince its institutional investors to take more risk and write bigger tickets. American pension funds allocate a materially larger share of their capital to venture and growth equity than European ones do. This is not a shortage of money in Europe it is a shortage of appetite and a regulatory issue. Until a European scale-up can raise a large round without crossing the Atlantic, we will keep exporting our best companies at exactly the moment they become valuable.
Third, Europe needs to make it easier for public institutions to buy from startups, including the ones they have incubated themselves. The US has a mechanism worth copying: the SBIR programme, which channels a fixed share of federal research budgets into purchasing from small companies. It turns public procurement into an innovation instrument rather than an obstacle.
Healthcare has no shortage of great ideas, but adoption is often slow. How do we make sure innovation reaches patients faster?
The single most important step would be to loosen the procurement and state-aid rules that prevent hospitals from buying from the companies they have spun out. We hear it from our hospital members constantly: they are not allowed to become alpha testers of products made by their own spinouts. Allowing this would mean faster and more powerful early-generation testing and development and being able to point to a parent hospital as first customer would lend enormous credibility to a new product.
The second obstacle is the sluggishness of the regulatory process itself. The Covid vaccine showed us what is possible: running regulatory procedures in parallel rather than sequentially can compress timelines dramatically without lowering the bar for safety. We proved it can be done under pressure. We should now do it by design.
And a third barrier that receives too little attention: reimbursement. Many good products survive approval and die in the payment system, because no one has decided who pays for them. A faster path to market is worth little without a faster path to reimbursement.
What type of people usually create the biggest breakthroughs – the experts, the outsiders, or the people who connect different worlds?
I dont look at it this way. They are all important.
Expertise is necessary, but in Copenhagen it is not scarce. We have world-class experts in abundance. What is scarce is the person who can sit between a quantum physicist and a clinician and see what neither of them can see alone.
That is also why geography matters so much. Connectors are not produced by strategy documents; they are produced by proximity. Put a protein scientist, an AI engineer and a hospital nurse in the same building, and connectors emerge on their own.
This does not diminish the other two groups. Some of the biggest breakthroughs ahead will come out of quantum research, which is unambiguously the domain of deep experts – quantum sensing in particular could bring remarkable advances in healthcare. And AI is democratising development across an ever-widening set of domains, so outsiders will increasingly spot solutions that are easier to see from outside the field. But the person who turns either into a company is usually a connector.
What healthcare innovation gives you the most hope for the future, and what would you love to see become reality in your lifetime?
This is a hard question. I am not a healthcare specialist.
What makes me think it is achievable is the pace of digitalisation across research, development and the clinic, and the coming convergence of life science with AI and quantum technology. Each of those fields is moving quickly on its own. Together, they change what is possible.
But that convergence will not happen inside a single laboratory. It happens where sequencing, computation and clinical practice sit within walking distance of each other. Building and expanding those places is precisely what we are here to do and it is why the question of physical space in this district is not an administrative detail, but the thing that determines whether we get there.
