About Me

I am a business advisor, board professional and former CEO with more than 30 years of experience in health, wellbeing and life sciences. I work with founders, leadership teams and boards on growth strategy, commercialization, financing and the organizational choices needed to turn opportunities into sustainable growth.

My strengths are in health, wellbeing and life sciences, but I also work comfortably across other business and technology areas. As a leader, my style is inclusive and participative, and the same approach is reflected in the way I coach and mentor people and teams.

Even though my career has been strongly business-driven, my background is in natural sciences. I hold a Master's degree with physics as my main focus. Early in my career, I had the privilege of working at CERN in Geneva as part of a multinational semiconductor detector project. This led me to the Finnish life science company Wallac Oy, which later became part of PerkinElmer and is now known as Revvity. My years at Wallac took me from R&D into business, marketing and sales, as well as business development, M&A and due diligence.

My heart beats for innovation, new beginnings and opportunities offered by novel business models and technologies. Throughout my career, I have worked with both in- and out-licensing, planned and executed commercialization strategies, built sales and distribution networks, and helped create and develop organizations. This work has often also required external financing, giving me broad experience with both national and international VC and grant funding.

Altogether, I have delivered more than 100 R&D, commercialization and business development projects and helped set up more than 20 startups. In addition to my own consultancy, Innocelex, I am active in mentoring networks including Business Mentors Finland and Nordic Mentor Network for Entrepreneurship.

I have also had the opportunity to look at innovation and business from "the other side of the table". First through collaboration with Karolinska Innovations, searching for Finnish investment targets for the Karolinska Development Fund, and later through evaluation and review assignments for research and innovation funding by the European Commission, from Framework Programme 6 to Horizon programmes. I have also acted as an invited steering group chair and member in several Business Finland/Tekes, ETLA and OSKE projects and programmes.

To summarize, my expertise is in precommercial and commercial innovation and business development. I like to grab the big picture, focus on the essentials through an analytical approach and engage fellow team members through inclusive leadership. I am driven by a customer- and business-first attitude, combined with enthusiasm for new technologies and their opportunities, while respecting sustainable values.