How to get tens of student deep tech startups from tech universities?

In the final event in the Deeptech Sandbox series the Eindhoven region deep tech ecosystem experts were hosted at TalTech to share their insights and ways that have led to success in the area.

Eindhoven University of Technology belongs to the top 200 universities in the world and is in the top 10 of technical universities in Europe. The university has been selected to the top 10 research universities in terms of industrial collaboration. For example, in 2006-2008, 10-20% of all their scientific publications were written collectively with industrial partners. The pinnacle of their partnerships is the long-term close relationship with Philips. The university has also been considered as being the third in the Europe in terms of the impactfulness of their research (and the first out of technical universities). TalTech has been collaborating with the Eindhoven University of Technology through the EuroTeQ project for some time now. The Deeptech Sandbox event series allowed us to expand this collaboration to knowledge sharing regarding technology transfer and the deep tech ecosystem.

Student teams are typically NGOs (comparable to MTÜ in Estonia) created and run by students over a period of several years. Each has a specific challenge that they work on. Students change over the years, but the challenge remains. Once there are mature technologies or innovations resulting from the work done, new companies are created to take the innovations to market or the technology is licensed out. In Estonia, similar types of projects would be the student formula teams or the student satellite teams. However, in Eindhoven there are more such teams and they have a 3-person team supporting them at the university.

The university support for student teams is not focused on funding. Instead, the student teams must gather their own resources. As a result, every year these teams receive approximately 10 million euro worth of in-kind contributions and financial support from companies in the region. Companies are happy to contribute because the student teams get a lot of publicity and are working on important causes, such as tackling climate or energy problems.

Eindhoven University of Technology is taking setting challenges for students seriously. They have staff members actively scouting academia and industry for new challenges that are open-ended, interdisciplinary and collaborative. They recognise that working on these challenges can increase a student’s study time by some months, but do not consider it as a problem because students significantly increase their employability by working on these practical and innovative challenges.

The event was organized by TalTech, Tehnopol Startup Incubator and EstBAN in cooperation with Startup Estonia.

Article was first published on TalTech website.