I never thought I would work in the nonprofit world, let alone become the CEO of an organization dedicated to women’s health.

My background is commercial. I studied organizational innovation and entrepreneurship, and I have always been interested in how we build things, how ideas become solutions, and how we solve problems from the ground up.

My way into women’s health actually started somewhere quite different: with technology.

While travelling in Asia back in 2022, I became fascinated by the role technology is in play in almost every part of society. That interest stayed with me, but over time, it also changed. The more I learned about technology, the more I realized that technology itself is rarely the whole story.

It is about what we put into it.

If the input is skewed, the output will be skewed too.

That sounds simple, but it has become fundamental to the way I think about innovation – and particularly healthcare innovation.

During my master’s degree, I researched the use of artificial intelligence in the Danish healthcare system. AI was, and still is, discussed as having enormous potential to transform healthcare. But underneath every conversation about algorithms and technology was a much more basic question: What data are we building them on?

That question eventually led me towards women’s health.

You cannot innovate around missing knowledge

We talk a lot about the potential for innovation in women’s health. And there is enormous potential.

But I think we sometimes start the conversation too far downstream.

Before we ask which new technology, diagnostic tool or treatment we should develop, we have to ask whether we actually have the research and data necessary to build it.

Historically, women have been underrepresented and, in some cases, excluded from clinical research. At the same time, women’s health has been significantly underfunded.

In 2020, only around 5% of global health research and development funding went towards women’s health. Four percentage points went to women’s cancers, leaving just 1% for all other women-specific conditions.

That is not simply a research problem.

It becomes an innovation problem.

When the underlying research is missing, founders have less evidence to build from. Investors have more uncertainty to navigate. Clinicians have fewer tools available. And technologies that depend on existing datasets risk carrying historical gaps into new systems.

We cannot expect innovation to compensate for decades of missing knowledge without investing in the foundation it depends on.

For me, this is one of the biggest structural challenges in women’s health today.

Why an ecosystem matters

Today, I am the CEO and Co-Founder of Nordic Women’s Health Hub, a Nordic non-profit NGO, that started as a grassroot movement and quickly gained public recognition by institutions and embassies around the world. We work to strengthen the women’s health innovation ecosystem across the Nordic region and create long-lasting systemic change.

When people hear “women’s health innovation”, they often immediately think about startups. Startups are an important part of it, but an ecosystem is much bigger than that.

It includes researchers, clinicians, founders, investors, corporations, foundations, policymakers and the healthcare system itself.

And one of the things I have learned is that many of the right people are already working on the right problems. They are just not always connected.

A researcher can spend years developing knowledge that never becomes a product. A founder can identify an important unmet need but struggle because there is not enough research behind it. An investor can be interested in women’s health but have limited visibility into what is actually being built. A clinician can see the same problem every day without having a pathway to the people who could potentially solve it.

That is why I believe ecosystem building matters.

At Nordic Women’s Health Hub, our role is not to pretend that one organization can solve the women’s health gap. We want to help build the connections and infrastructure that allow many different actors to solve parts of it.

That means mapping the innovation landscape, connecting people who would otherwise sit in different rooms, bringing clinical needs closer to innovators, increasing visibility around emerging solutions, and creating conversations between people who approach the same challenge from completely different perspectives.

Systemic problems rarely belong to one sector. Their solutions cannot either.

Leadership means changing hats

Becoming a CEO in the nonprofit world has also challenged some of my own assumptions about leadership.

I did not expect how much time would go into fundraising. Or how often I would need to switch hats.

In one conversation, I might be speaking with a researcher. In the next, an investor, a foundation, a founder, a policymaker or someone from industry.

The problem I am talking about might be exactly the same, but the framing cannot always be.

Researchers naturally care about evidence. Investors need to understand opportunities and risks. Foundations think about impact. Companies need to understand where they can contribute. Policymakers have to consider how an issue fits into a much larger healthcare system.

I used to think that communicating the same issue differently to different audiences risked diluting the message.

I see it differently now.

If you are trying to create systemic change, part of leadership is being able to understand what matters to the person sitting across from you – and helping them see where they fit into the solution.

You can change the language without changing the mission.

That has probably been one of my biggest lessons.

The Nordics have something unusual

I also believe there is a particular opportunity for women’s health in the Nordic region.

The Nordics have something many parts of the world do not: decades of population-level health and register data, combined with highly digitized societies, strong research institutions and established healthcare systems.

For someone who became interested in healthcare through questions about data, that is incredibly exciting.

We also have emerging women’s health innovation ecosystems and a growing willingness across sectors to take the field seriously.

But having these assets is not enough.

Data sitting in a registry does not automatically become better healthcare. Research does not automatically become innovation. Innovation does not automatically reach patients.

The real opportunity is in connecting those pieces.

What happens if researchers, clinicians and innovators can work more closely together? What happens if Nordic countries collaborate rather than build parallel ecosystems? What happens if investors can see the opportunities emerging from better research? And what happens if our unique data infrastructure is used intentionally to close some of the knowledge gaps that have existed for decades?

I think the Nordics have an opportunity not only to participate in the growth of women’s health, but to demonstrate what a more connected, evidence-based innovation ecosystem can look like.

Start with the foundation

Women’s health is receiving more attention today than it has for a long time. More founders are entering the space. Investors are paying attention. Governments are developing strategies. Researchers and advocates have pushed the subject further onto the agenda.

That momentum matters.

But I do not think we should confuse momentum with having solved the underlying problem.

If we want better diagnostics, better treatments and better technologies, we need better research. We need representative clinical studies. We need better data. And we need systems that allow knowledge to move from research into innovation and eventually into healthcare.

I have always been drawn to understanding why a problem exists before trying to solve it.

In women’s health, that means looking beneath the solutions we want to build and asking whether we have built the foundation they need.

Because innovation can only move as far as the knowledge underneath it allows.

And if we want to change the output, sometimes we have to go all the way back to the input.