Karolinska Institutet has a proud history of ground breaking discoveries that have improved the lives for people all over the world, with the pacemaker, the gamma knife and the Seldinger technique as inspirational examples. Now we have the opportunity to re-establish Sweden as a strong global actor in life sciences.

Region Stockholm has a stated ambition of securing the region a place among the world’s five leading life sciences hubs by 2023. This is where we have a key role to play. As Sweden’s top medical university, Karolinska Institutet has a responsibility to contribute to the development of society as a whole, particularly in the health care sector. The journey to that goal involves, among other things, greater innovation and continued concerted knowledge development.

On this website, we present some of the ideas that have emanated from Karolinska Institutet over the past 20 years; ideas selected to reveal the breadth of our work. We hope they will inspire and encourage yet more innovation.

At the same time as needing to be better at noticing and encouraging new ideas, we must also be better at developing them so that more of them become innovations that can be implemented in the healthcare system. We do not achieve substantive change until new breakthroughs reach everyday healthcare in the form of new products and methods and improved organisation and working practice.

This is something for us to work on in the future. We need to know more about the extent to which our research and development leads to societal benefit and improves daily life for patients and staff: the obstacles we need to remove and the success factors we should embrace. My ambition is to strengthen this knowledge, also on the national level, by working for more research related to how we best implement new products and findings to create world-class healthcare.

As we call for increased inno­vation and commercialisation, we must maintain transparency and academic freedom. This requires robust ethical and critical think­ing.