30 April 2021 | For the first EuroTech Innovation Day, which took place on 28 April 2021, the six EuroTech Universities put together a comprehensive programme packed with inspiring talks, a hackathon for students in the field of biomedical engineering and a EuroTech start-up competition. The event was hosted by Technion Israel Institute of Technology and marked the kick-off to EuroTech’s 10-year anniversary celebrations this year. Some 850 people followed the event online, around 3,000 voted in the EuroTech start-up competition, and 80 students and mentors took part in the hackathon.
Entrepreneurship & 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 in 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 celebrated this entrepreneurial spirit and looked 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 Universities, Technion’s President Prof. Uri Sivan opened the Innovation Day. 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 programme 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. The six universities showcased their accelerators and incubators. 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. 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 organised an online hackathon, in which 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 EuroTech’s 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 Simon Elben Hertig or Valerie Schegk from the EuroTech Brussels Office.
