About the Programme

Established in Denmark in 2018, the BioMedical Design Novo Nordisk Foundation Fellowship Programme (BMD) is an educational training programme to up-skill innovative talent and drive innovation within the medical technology space.

BMD aims to educate a diverse but select group of experienced professionals from the fields of healthcare, product design, engineering, science, and business, giving them hands-on experience with health innovation and commercialization.

Organized under a single programme management team with local offices at AarhusUniversity and the University of Copenhagen– anchored in both universities within their faculties of health and medical sciences – the programme in Denmark is inspired by the BioDesign programme at Stanford University. Today, multiple similar programmes exist on all continents; however, only a few of these are full-time.

Vision and Mission

The BMD vision is to develop innovation talents through training and immersion in the clinic to gain the knowledge and skills needed to drive innovation of solutions that improve prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of health conditions that burden health systems and patients.

The mission is to foster innovation competences, network, and an entrepreneurial mindset among professionals in the Danish life science ecosystem, including hospitals and research institutions, by providing:

• tailormade educational training in clinical, needs-driven innovation methodology,
• broad networks and collaborations between hospitals, healthcare stakeholders and entrepreneurs,
• support in the development and implementation of new solutions to unmet needs.

Recruiting a Variety of Fellows and Clinical Host Institutions

Interdisciplinarity in teams promotes inventiveness. However, being able to work in interdisciplinary teams and achieve success are skills in which none are trained under Denmark’s current educational system.

Furthermore, inventing new medical devices/technologies requires input from many different disciplines and international healthcare systems. For these reasons, BMD has prioritized attracting participants from a wide array of disciplines and inviting up to four internationals to join the programme yearly.

Participating clinical host departments are selected from among the Danish hospitals on an annual basis. Each year, two regions must identify qualified host departments and encourage these to apply, to host Fellows during clinical immersion. A fixed, rotating schedule ensures equal opportunity across the regions and provides clarity of role and predictability.