Best of Boston, part 1

Visa Sippola, Surgify CEO, and Anna-Maria Henell

This Monday, I traveled to Boston for a week with a team of three companies: Disior, Web Microscope and Surgify, with Declan Flaherty and Markku Fagerlund from Health Capital Helsinki.

The trip is part of the market exposure program, to plan the entry strategies for the US market.

The first day, we visited CIC Cambridge. The place is a community, office and co-working space for innovative companies, with history as a startup hub since 1999. It’s made for networking and co-creation, as it has food served around the clock for the people to sit and eat together. Events are rotating at different locations around the building, so you keep on meeting new people.

This builds the same kind of innovation culture as MIT campus and the likes – work together, share your learnings, help the others. With parallel problems, different research and different fields can help each other. Looking forwards to hosting similar culture at the Terkko Health Hub in Finland!

As for the work ethics, they also have showers there, which is nice as I heard a story or two of people ending up sleeping there after a long day.

In the first two days, I have met with people from both med tech industry and local university hospitals and clinics. The long history of entrepreneurship and innovation culture comes through in people helping, connecting and networking. “If I can’t help you, I’ll introduce you to someone who can” is a common practice

And what comes to sales pitch, that’s all about the networks, too. Figure out who you want to talk to, and who you need to do the introduction. Be prepared to meet several times, before things start to happen. And when they do, they really do – the best networks here are big.
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The best meetings and the best pitches can happen anywhere. Not in a meeting room, but over a coffee when someone knows someone.

​Anna-Maria Henell is the CEO and Founder of Disior.

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