For the fourth consecutive year, Estonia has emerged as the leader in Emerging Europe’s annual ranking of investment promotion agencies. Known for its highly digitalized society and open business environment, is Estonia on top of its competitors in innovation, creativity, and community building.
Craig Turp-Balazs, editor of Emerging Europe, credits the hard work of the Invest Estonia team for maintaining the country’s high standards. Those efforts are directly translating into the results. Last year, the agency helped bring €351M worth of foreign direct investments and over 1600 new high-paying jobs to the country, an all-time record.
Among Invest Estonia’s notable achievements is the introduction of ComparEST, an online tool that enables foreign investors to compare Estonia with other countries based on various factors, including the business environment, labor market, and taxation. It combines machine learning, academic research, and the expertise of investment advisors to provide data-backed insights into Estonia’s competitiveness. The tool has already received recognition and was shortlisted for an award in the Modern and Future-proof Policymaking Initiative category by Emerging Europe and listed among UNESCO’s top 100 artificial intelligence projects.
Besides the new developments, a well-proved electronic investment advisor, Eia, continues to help to handle the increasing number of customer inquiries. It can generate detailed investment offers, assign leads to advisors, and interact with the organization’s sales force automation system, providing efficient and uninterrupted service.
In this context, Invest Estonia underlines how the country is a perfect place to build a digital health startup. The health economy is one of the world’s fastest-growing industries, where Digital Therapeutics (DTx) has clinically proven software applications prescribed by physicians to prevent or treat specific diseases. It means that digital therapeutic applications go through clinical trials and regulatory review, like a traditional drug or medical device, in order to validate their safety and efficacy.
To accelerate the adoption of evidence-based digital therapeutic solutions and drive cross-industry collaboration, DTx Estonia includes a digital headache clinic, a speech therapy platform, digital therapeutic solutions for psoriasis and mental health, as well as a platform for predicting and preventing heart disease.
Digital medicine manufacturers need a long-term vision from the government for the systematic development of digital medicines as a new high-tech industry. In the deployment of new health technologies, one option is to use a model of public-private collaboration to bring the solutions to market more efficiently, quickly, and flexibly. For the introduction of more complex technologies, the public sector can work with companies that specialize in solving a particular problem with long-term investment.
The ultimate goal is to create an ecosystem of different services and solutions. Another association that helps boost the health economy is Health Founders, the first health tech accelerator in the Baltics. The people involved in DTx Estonia and Health Founders are all more or less intertwined. Still, the latter comes in with helping early-stage startups through their wide network of mentors with long-term healthcare industry experience.
“The digital health sector is predicted to grow 30% annually over the next five years and reach 640 billion by 2026. This is fueled by technological advancements and favorable government policies due to the pandemic. All this creates a massive opportunity for new entrants with solutions that have a global impact. There is a saying that the world’s biggest problems are also the biggest business opportunities. Nowhere is this more true than in healthcare“, reported co-founder Saare.
According to the latest data from UNCTAD, in 2022 FDI inflows across emerging Europe reached $85.5 billion, showing a 2% decrease compared to 2021, following a 64% increase in the previous year.