The first year of OYS­TER in Oulu’s Health & Life Sci­ence Incu­ba­tor activ­i­ties

The OYS­TER health and life sci­ence busi­ness incu­ba­tor, launched at the begin­ning of 2024, has been an inter­est­ing and edu­ca­tion­al jour­ney both for the teams devel­op­ing busi­ness ideas and for our project team. From the very start, our goal was to build both a pre-incu­ba­tor and a full busi­ness incu­ba­tor – to pro­vide spar­ring for the devel­op­ment of ear­ly-stage ideas as well as long-term sup­port for the growth of start-ups.

The first months were spent design­ing oper­a­tional mod­els, explor­ing the lat­est research on busi­ness incu­ba­tion, and build­ing coop­er­a­tion with expe­ri­enced incu­ba­tors in the field. We also brought in exter­nal con­sul­tan­cy, while our project team already had strong expe­ri­ence in entre­pre­neur­ship and busi­ness incu­ba­tion.

In autumn 2024, we orga­nized the first 100-day pre-incu­ba­tor pro­gram, with 13 teams par­tic­i­pat­ing. Five of them con­tin­ued into the full OYS­TER incu­ba­tor pro­gram, which start­ed at the begin­ning of 2025. Alto­geth­er, 10 teams began in the main busi­ness incu­ba­tor pro­gram, which is still ongo­ing.

What did we learn from oth­ers?

From Euro­pean suc­cess sto­ries, such as the Smile incu­ba­tor in Lund, a few crit­i­cal suc­cess fac­tors stood out: the exper­tise of incu­ba­tor man­agers, strong ecosys­tem net­works, exter­nal experts, finan­cial know-how, and strong region­al com­mit­ment to long-term incu­ba­tor fund­ing in addi­tion to nation­al fund­ing coor­di­nat­ed by Vin­no­va. These prin­ci­ples also guide the devel­op­ment of OYS­TER.
We also pro­duced a report based on the lat­est research and exist­ing ref­er­ence incu­ba­tors: Health and life sci­ence busi­ness incu­ba­tors – lit­er­a­ture review and bench­mark­ing.

A long-term field requires long-term sup­port

In health and life sci­ences, devel­op­ment cycles are long, as prod­ucts and ser­vices under­go strict reg­u­la­tion and often require years of work before reach­ing com­mer­cial­iza­tion. In the incu­ba­tors we bench­marked, com­pa­nies typ­i­cal­ly spent 2–3 years in the pro­gram. At lat­er stages, inter­na­tion­al accel­er­a­tors spe­cial­ized in the sec­tor can help com­pa­nies scale fur­ther into glob­al mar­kets.

The OYS­TER incu­ba­tor is co-fund­ed by the EU, coor­di­nat­ed by Busi­nes­sOulu, and imple­ment­ed in coop­er­a­tion with the Uni­ver­si­ty of Oulu’s Kert­tu Saalasti Insti­tute and Mart­ti Ahti­saari Insti­tute as well as Oulu Uni­ver­si­ty of Applied Sci­ences. OYS­TER com­ple­ments the OuluHealth ecosys­tem along­side, for exam­ple, Oulu Health Labs. Net­works, access to fund­ing, team devel­op­ment, and col­lab­o­ra­tion with sec­tor stake­hold­ers are essen­tial suc­cess fac­tors for new health and life sci­ence start-ups.

Look­ing ahead

It is impor­tant to build a sta­ble and long-term fund­ing base for incu­ba­tion activ­i­ties so that they can also devel­op to meet future chal­lenges and turn ideas into real, pro­duc­tive inno­va­tions. Research-to-Busi­ness (R2B) projects in uni­ver­si­ties can also ben­e­fit from strong incu­ba­tor sup­port to help ideas grow into sus­tain­able new com­pa­nies.

The first year of OYS­TER has shown that with the right part­ners, net­works, and a com­mit­ted team, it is pos­si­ble to build a func­tion­ing plat­form for the growth com­pa­nies of the future. At the end of August, a new pre-incu­ba­tor pro­gram was launched with 17 par­tic­i­pat­ing teams, and the inter­est in the pro­gram also demon­strates the need for this activ­i­ty. This is a strong foun­da­tion to build on.

Source: Uni­ver­si­ty of Oulu

Text: Heik­ki Ail­in­pieti, B.Sc., Mas­ter of Cul­ture and Arts, Project Researcher, Uni­ver­si­ty of Oulu Kert­tu Saalasti Insti­tute, Micro-Entre­pre­neur­ship Cen­tre MicroEN­TRE

Image: Riik­ka Savela