“Meet the Giants” won by Dresden’s Novum Engineering
Tuesday at the Hannover Messe, Mandy Schipke, CEO of Dresden-based Novum Engineering walked out of the startup “boxing ring” with a trip to Singapore and connections with important potential industry partners in the pocket.
Mandy took part in the “Meet the Industry Giants” program – a competition organized by Holland Innovative, HighTechXL, StartupDelta, the High Tech Campus, the Province of Brabant, and Brainport Development, in collaboration with Get in the Ring.
The 2-day program is designed to connect startups from the Netherlands and Germany with corporates in the areas of Industry 4.0, mobility, energy, and research and technology. Startups and corporates need each other, as the High Tech Campus’s Bert-Jan Woertman explained at the opening of the event.
“There’s no ‘freemium’ model for hardware, and you can’t get away with a minimum viable product.”Bert-Jan Woertman, High Tech Campus Eindhoven
“Hardware is hard”, Woertman stated. “There’s no ‘freemium’ model for hardware, and you can’t get away with a minimum viable product. We need each other in order to be successful.”
The kind of cooperation Bert-Jan Woertman describes involves the corporate acting as a launching customer, mentor, or lead investor for the startup, while the startup shares its innovative solution with the corporate in the form of a partnership. As he put it, it’s “access to knowledge, supply chain, and resources on the one hand, and fast innovation on the other.”
Batteries
Mandy and her team have developed and patented a new method of monitoring batteries that allows for constant, exact determination of the battery’s charging status and also keeps an eye on degradation. The wear point can also be predicted in advance.“Normally, we don’t know much about our batteries,” says Mandy. “We look at our cell phones and see that we’ve got 20% battery left, but then suddenly it’s at 0% and we don’t know why.” But now thanks to Novum Engineering’s new technology, we can have access to exact and real-time information about the battery.
“Normally, we don’t know much about our batteries,” says Mandy. “We look at our cell phones and see that we’ve got 20% battery left, but then suddenly it’s at 0% and we don’t know why.” But now thanks to Novum Engineering’s new technology, we can have access to exact and real-time information about the battery.
For solar panel owners, this means a longer lifespan for home storage batteries. But the technology has many other applications, including APUs (Auxiliary Power Units), marine energy, and aviation and space travel. In the future, the technology could be extremely interesting for the EV industry.
Germany’s role in the collaboration
In addition to collaborating with HighTechXL via the HighTech Startbahn incubator, Germany plans to set up a €300 million startup fund with the intention of investing in pan-European ventures. Dr. Sabine Hepperle, Director-General SME for the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy states that in this sense, the Meet the Industry Giants program fits perfectly with her political agenda. She lamented the fact that Germany lags far behind the United States in terms of available capital for startups, and revealed that Germany plans to double its ratio of startup capital to GDP in the coming years.
Dresden
The fact that the winner of the competition comes from Dresden is fortuitous because as the Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs Henk Kamp announced during the event, HighTechXL has just launched a new partnership with the HighTech Startbahn startup incubator in Dresden.
Mandy is looking forward to the trip to Singapore, but she says that the most valuable takeaway will be the network and the connections with the corporates that the Eindhoven Brainport and Dresden industry hubs can offer her.
The jury
Judging the quality of the startups’ business proposition and pitch were Ray Quintana (Cottonwood Technology Fund), Willem Drost (StartupDelta), Anupam Nayak (Medical Robotic Technologies), Betsy Lindsey (HighTechXL), and Bettina Vossberg (HighTech Startbahn).
Betsy Lindsey, Managing Director Investor Relations at HighTechXL, shares her excitement about the Meet the Industry Giants program: “This collaboration is going to be important for exchanging ecosystem power. This will set up the basis for a cross-collaboration between the two countries and high-tech centers.”
All pictures (c) Bobby Born / Eindhoven365
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