RUFF & CO. was proud to be a conference partner and contributor to the Lighthouse Light Science conference on implementation and scaling of health innovation, hosted by Danish Life Science Cluster in collaboration with the Confederation of Danish Industry and taking place on the 4th of May in Copenhagen.

The conference brought together 18 unique speakers and 150 highly engaged participants from across the healthcare and life science ecosystem, including start-ups and large companies, municipalities (home care, elderly care), regions, hospitals, and key public-private stakeholders.

RUFF & CO. supported the development of the conference from concept to execution, contributing to the storytelling, programme design, speaker selection, workshops, and the overall “red thread” throughout the day. Susie A. Ruff also contributed as both moderator and speaker.

The focus was clear: how do we move from promising health technologies to real implementation, procurement, and scalable impact?

Throughout the day, participants worked actively in roadmap workshops and discussions, exploring legal, organisational, and financial barriers — as well as new opportunities emerging from the Danish healthcare reform.

The strong engagement during the conference and across LinkedIn afterwards confirmed the relevance of the topic: implementation and scaling cannot be solved in silos. It requires trust, dialogue, shared priorities, and stronger collaboration across the public and private healthcare ecosystem.

At RUFF & CO., we believe implementation and scaling is not just a project, it is a capability we build together. And we will continue working on it:

From Innovation to Scaling – When Partnerships pave the way to better health

Yesterday I attended the board meeting and general assembly of Danish Life Science Cluster with a fantastic view from the 18th floor of the new INCUBA building in Aarhus, Denmark and wonderful energy in the room.

Danish Life Science Cluster will soon be presenting a new strategy, and for me, three things stand out:

🍀 The cluster brings the entire ecosystem together: Denmark’s national life science cluster, bringing together industry, home care and elderly care, hospitals, psychiatry and mental health institutions, research institutions, and other key stakeholders.
🍀 The value lies in concrete connections: The strength of the cluster is not only the network itself, but the activities where stakeholders are brought closer together around concrete needs, solutions, and partnerships. This is where we can create better conditions for faster implementation and scaling, both nationally and internationally.
🍀 Life science is a broad and important value chain: from pharmaceuticals and biotechnology to medtech, health IT, and welfare technology. This breadth is a strength because solutions to the healthcare challenges of the future are rarely created in one place alone, but also in partnerships.

I represent SME members of the cluster on the board. I look forward to continuing the work with a strong board to turn strategy into concrete value for the life science ecosystem in Denmark.

RUFF & CO had the pleasure of lecturing at Copenhagen Business School for students from the MSc in Business Administration and Innovation in Healthcare.

The session focused on public-private innovation and partnerships in healthcare, a topic that is becoming increasingly critical as health systems face growing national and global challenges. To create real, scalable solutions, we need to move beyond silos and bring the right actors together across healthcare providers, industry, research, foundations, and public organisations.

Denmark has a strong foundation for this. With a long tradition of trust-based collaboration, user involvement, and cross-sector co-creation, the Danish healthcare ecosystem holds significant potential for developing and implementing innovative solutions that create value for patients, professionals, companies, and society.

During the session, we explored key success factors for effective public-private innovation, including:

• Placing user needs at the centre of innovation
• understanding the perspectives, opportunities, and constraints of different stakeholders
• moving beyond “pilotitis” toward long-term partnerships with real implementation and procurement potential
• navigating the strong Danish funding landscape, from early-stage public funding to private foundations and investment-driven health innovation

The lecture was part of the students’ Innovation Project, where they work on real healthcare challenges for host organisations and companies in the Danish healthcare sector.

At RUFF & CO, we are passionate about bridging strategy, innovation, and implementation in health and life science. It was inspiring to meet the next generation of international healthcare innovators and discuss how stronger partnerships can help accelerate meaningful change.

We are proud to contribute to this important programme, established in 2016 as a collaboration between Copenhagen Business School and the University of Copenhagen. It continues to be a rewarding partnership — and a valuable platform for shaping future leaders in healthcare innovation.

I was invited to write a contribution to the Innovation Blog of the Region of Southern Denmark and Southern Denmark Health Innovation. I was invited to become a member of the Innovation Forum of this innovative region. I decided to go for my favourite topic – addressing implementation! Please see the English version below:

Susie A. Ruff:
When working with health innovation, leaders must consider how to organise around innovation and create the necessary structure and governance to succeed.

When we talk about innovation in my world, implementation is the final and crucial phase that ensures the solution or change becomes embedded and creates added value in the healthcare system. I always tell my students at CBS International Business School, MSc in Innovation in Healthcare: “There is no successful innovation without implementation.”

✅ There are many reasons why implementation fails:

🔹 Lack of a needs analysis involving key stakeholders

🔹 Insufficient support from staff

🔹 Inadequate patient involvement

🔹 Poor coordination between departments

🔹 Resistance to change

✅ Implementation requires leadership and attention
Central aspects include the leadership and planning of the implementation process. Implementation brings transformation and is almost always accompanied by digital elements. If leadership does not set the agenda for strategy and execution of the implementation – including staff involvement – things can go wrong, take too long, and strain budgets. Communication around implementation is also vital.

✅ I also believe it is important to consider:
Is the organisation ready to implement? Is there preparedness for change? Can it ensure sustainable and long-term implementation?
Another important dimension is what we are implementing. When we talk about implementation in healthcare, we often think first of new technology. But implementation applies to other crucial areas: new workflows, new clinical guidelines, new organisational structures, new service design, and more.

✅ How do we approach this?
In my experience, it can be a major task to conceptualise and plan how implementation should be approached and led. Within Implementation Science, there has been extensive research into the implementation of new technologies and workflows in healthcare, and several models and frameworks have been developed that can serve as inspiration.

✅ To break the cycle and create real change, we must rethink how we succeed with implementation:

🔹 Involve users early and continuously: When citizens, patients, and clinicians feel ownership, the likelihood of adoption increases.

🔹 Strengthen leadership anchoring: When leaders actively prioritise innovation projects, it creates space for staff to adopt them.

🔹 Bridge research and practice: Integrate evidence and evaluation from day one.

🔹 Design for scaling: Ensure solutions can work broadly across the healthcare system.

🔹 Work in partnerships: Engage companies, healthcare professionals, municipalities, and other key stakeholders.

If you need strategy or support for the implementation and scaling of health innovation, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

For the original Danish Version, please use this link:
Innovationsklumme Syddansk Sundhedsinnovation Region Syd

 

Congratulations to Danish Life Science Cluster and all partners for organizing such an energetic, well-curated conference, exhibition, and networking event dedicated to health innovation in Denmark.
I had the great pleasure of moderating a session on the Stories behind selected Health Tech Startups and their solutions, and it was truly inspiring to meet Jørgen Jakobsen from CoFlow Visuals (Denmark), Sigrid WILLEMS from OSO-AI (France), and Dr Anna Cichowska Myrup MD FFPH MISF from Sophro Denmark! Each innovation journey is unique. Sometimes it’s driven by a personal experience and an unmet need; other times it’s serendipity, meeting the right person at the right moment, who voices a challenge that sparks a new healthcare solution.

Other highlights from WHINN included sessions on The Lighthouse Life Science, an ambitious Danish public-private partnership addressing major societal health challenges such as obesity, mental health, and health equity. The format is a testing lab for new frameworks and ways of working to develop future solutions with the user at the center.

And of course, there were important discussions on implementation of health technologies, a continuous challenge we must overcome to accelerate innovation in practice.

WHINN Week of Health Innovation Denmark

Lighthouse Life Science – Transforming Health with Partnerships

No successful innovation in healthcare without implementation

I got the opportunity to deliver a lecture on the importance of focusing on implementation when innovating in healthcare at AIT Entrepreneurship Center at Asian Institute of Technology at the beautiful campus just outside of Bangkok.

No Successful Innovation in Healthcare without Implementation. Technology alone is not enough. The true challenge and opportunity lie in adoption, diffusion, scaling, and sustained use. Implementing innovation is not a one-time rollout—it’s an ongoing effort to institutionalize new practices. The challenge is global in all healthcare systems – Denmark, Asia…:
Leaders must actively manage the transition from pilot to routine, including:

* Securing long-term funding
* Supporting behavior change
* Adjusting roles, routines, and regulations
* Building feedback and learning loops

Implementation Science is a field that we need to study more and apply. Research has led to the design of frameworks that can help both healthcare organisations and industry – and we need to work together. I my own work, I have come across several implementation frameworks and tools that can inspire and structure messy realities.

Great to be with inspiring faculty and engaged students at the Entrepreneurship Center. Thanks to all for the fruitful discussion about this important topic and sharing your own local experiences added so much to the content.

Asian Institute of Technology

#Implementationscience #Implementation #Healthinnovation #Digitalhealth #Transformation #Asia

Exciting news!

I’m returning to Techsauce Global Summit 2025 — this time as Co-Curator and Moderator/Speaker of the full day HealthTech Summit on 5 August in vibrant Bangkok! 🌏
Since 2018, I’ve proudly collaborated with Techsauce and its co-founder and CEO Oranuch (Mimee) Lerdsuwankij as trusted advisor and co-curator. It’s one of the largest and most dynamic platforms for global innovation in Southeast Asia. This year’s theme of the summit — “The Dawn of Symbiosis” — perfectly captures the power of cross-sector collaboration.

The Health Tech Summit, which is a part of the three-day Techsauce Global Summit, has now turned into a full day conference – a mirror of the increased global interest in how we will deliver healthcare in the future.

I’m incredibly proud to bring together 29 thought leaders and experts from across the healthcare ecosystem in Thailand and Asia, who, during 11 sessions, will be sharing real-world cases and insights that span System Transformation in a hospital setting, digital health, health equity, healthcare resilience in situations of crisis, and much more.

For more information, please check:

Health Tech Summit agenda 2025

#Techsauce2025 #HealthTechSummit #DigitalHealth #HealthcareInnovation #ASEANHealthTech #FutureOfHealth#GlobalHealthLeadership

I’m proud and excited to have joined the Board of Danish Life Science Cluster – and honoured to be elected as 3rd Vice Chair!

It’s a privilege to contribute to Denmark’s national cluster for life science and welfare technology, where collaboration between business, research, and the public sector is key to driving innovation, growth, and healthier lives! Danish Life Science Cluster has 250+ members from both healthcare industry, public hospitals, care organisations, research institutions and other actors in the Life Science ecosystem. The cluster is certified with a gold label from European Clusters Excellence under the European Union.

I look forward to working with the board, the cluster team, and our members to strengthen the link between ideas and implementation – and between people and solutions that truly make a difference.

Thank you for the trust 🙏

#lifescience #healthtech #innovation #klyngesamarbejde #bestyrelsesarbejde #danishlifesciencecluster #boardwork

Together with Business Finland I was thrilled to host a successful Finnish-Danish webinar on AI in Healthcare, bringing together leading healthcare innovators, tech experts, and system stakeholders from both countries. The event showcased cutting-edge AI solutions and opened the door to new cross-border collaboration opportunities.

The webinar built on the insights from the recent “Snapshot of AI in Danish Healthcare” report, developed by RUFF & CO. for Business Finland. The report highlights key trends, challenges, and partnership potential in the Danish healthcare ecosystem. Are you a part of the Finnish Life Science ecosystem – then Please reach out to us if you with a copy of the Snapshot!

The Key Themes of the webinar were:
👉 Strategic use of AI to support clinical decision-making, diagnostics, and population health management
👉 Cross-border innovation potential, leveraging Nordic strengths in digital infrastructure and health data
👉 Case presentations from Finnish and Danish companies showcasing real-world AI applications (e.g., early diagnosis, patient flow optimization, predictive analytics)

The key Takeaways:
💦 Strong interest in bilateral collaboration around AI pilots, procurement models, and regulatory alignment
💦 Finland’s and Denmark’s healthcare ecosystems are well-positioned for AI-driven transformation, given their structured health data, public-private models, and tech-savvy environments.

Many thanks to all great and thought speakers as well as the Business Finland team in Copenhagen.

#AIinhealthcare #digitalhealth #Healthdata #Nordiccollaboration