Entrepreneurship and Innovation is one of the five Focus Areas of the EuroTech Universities Alliance. It is THE cross-cutting theme connecting the six partners and most of their activities. Embedded into their institutional DNA, innovation marks a vital building block of the partners’ individual and joint success. EuroTech has set up a unique framework to promote an entrepreneurial mindset in their students and staff. The Alliance supports them to invent new solutions to societal problems and deploy those on the European market. With a hub in Brussels, EuroTech also brings forward policy suggestions on the framework conditions to commercialize capital-intensive technologies for the benefit of society. The 2021 Innovation Day celebrates this entrepreneurial spirit and looks back on 10-years of success stories.
Innovation Day 2021: “Transcending Borders – Striving for Excellence”
As host to the event and on behalf of all EuroTech partners, Technion's President Prof. Uri Sivan opened the Alliance's first Innovation Day on April 28. He congratulated EuroTech on 10 years of successful collaboration and applauded the Innovation Day initiative and spirit: “There is nothing more satisfying than unleashing the creativity of young people.”
The full-day online event program was clustered into five different themes: Boosting Entrepreneurship, Students at the Forefront of Academia Innovation, From Product to Market, On the Critical Role of Supporting Environments, Startups & Ventures and EuroTech’s coolest Startup Competition. Six high-ranking speakers from TUM contributed to the different sessions. Prof. Dr. Gerhard Kramer, Senior Vice President Research & Innovation presented the new TUM Venture Lab Initiative together with Prof. Dr. Helmut Schönenberger, Co-Founder and CEO of UnternehmerTUM. The perfect founding conditions of the Munich eco-systems were highlighted in multiple talks throughout the program.
The other EuroTech partners showcased their accelerators and incubators, such as the TU/e Innovation Space, DTU Skylab, École Polytechnique’s DRAHI-X Novation Center and t-hub, Technion’s Entrepreneurship & Innovation Center. The event concluded with a start-up competition of each institution’s own companies. The audience had the chance to cast a vote between 12 different start-ups. TUM entered the competition with Filics, a robotic high-tech start-up, and Awake Mobility, a data science start-up focused on public bus operations. Harmony, a Technion start-up developing a wearable, continuous, and non-invasive tracker to monitor women's hormonal levels, came out as the winner of the public voting.
Biomedical Engineering Hackathon
Parallel to the Innovation Day, Technion’s Faculty of Biomedical Engineering organized an online hackathon. TUM scientists and biomedical experts supported the initiative in acting as mentors and jurors throughout the hackathon. 50 students from the different partners participated. The aim was to bring student teams with diverse academic backgrounds and different nationalities together to find solutions for medical challenges and simulate the experience establishing a biomedical start-up. The winning team proposed a solution for the topic of Dental caries detection, two teams came in second place proposing solutions for Pressure ulcers prevention and Drug Repurposing, and the team in third proposed a solution for Treatment for Multiple Sclerosis. A total prize of 2.500 Euro, sponsored by NGT3-VC and Philips, was split between the four teams.
Get involved in Entrepreneurship & Innovation
Multiple other activities have sparked out of the Entrepreneurship & Innovation Focus Area, such as the European Venture Programme and a variety of joint research projects. If you are interested in getting involved in European cooperation in the fields of Entrepreneurship & Innovation, please contact the TUM colleague in Brussels, Maria-Valerie Schegk.
You are interested in TUM events in Entrepreneurship and Innovation; seek TUM-wide connections to researchers and staff, or need dedicated promotion for your technology-based, growth-oriented TUM start-up? Please contact Anna-Sophie Rauschenbach, TUMentrepreneurship Events & Marketing.