Introduction & objective

There is a clear need in the animal health sector in Europe to bring early developers (academia, research organisations, spin-offs/start-ups) and medium- to big size companies together to facilitate interaction and collaboration between them and thus stimulate innovation.

To fill this gap we will organize a conference differentiating from B2B conferences and focussing on innovation in animal health through collaboration in the phase of predevelopment/discovery/proof-of-concept: Discovery to Innovation in Animal Health (DIAH).

The DIAH-conference will be characterised by:

• A limited number of participants (eg. max. 200 delegates) and more, informal, interactions between them
• a focus on co-development and R&D-collaborations between industry and academia/research organisations

The goals and objectives of the conference are to

• enable networking among different actors in the field, including researchers, academia, funders, and industry
• improve access of industry to front-edge technologies and expertise in academia
• familiarize researchers with the innovation pipeline process, stages of product development, IP and the regulatory frameworks
• learn young and entrepreneurial researchers to pitch their technology to industry
• align valuation of breakthrough technologies by universities and industry and manage expectations at both sides
• pinpoint differences in culture and objectives between academia and industry, find solutions to overcome them and present best practices of working together
• facilitate researchers scaling up new discoveries/proof of concepts/prototypes to marketable innovations
• show the value of the animal health sector to innovators, funders and industries that are less familiar with the sector but have interesting technologies
• demonstrate the value of interesting ecosystems for innovation in animal health and stimulate collaboration between them
• stimulate (international) public private partnerships for innovation in animal health
• get to know each other better, both when doing business and having fun

For more information on the programme and sponsoring opportunities, download the prospectus [PDF].