dmund Phelps, the US Nobel prize winner from 2006, recently claimed
that Europe has run out of ideas and sufers from joylessness in business.
The EUTOP50 initiative and the entrepreneurs pitching their innovative
ideas this week show that is clearly not the case.
So does the work of the European Institute of Innovation & Technology
(EIT) and its Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs). KICs integrate
education, research and business to drive innovation and entrepreneurship
– until now more than 1,250 startups have been supported, contributing to
more than 600 new products and services.
In essence, KICs help to provide funding and support to commercialise
the best ideas, promote people that are ready to innovate and become
entrepreneurs and provide a breeding ground to realise Europe’s potential in
sectors such as energy, raw materials, climate, health, ICT and food (advanced
manufacturing and urban mobility upcoming).
How is a KIC doing that? KICs have a holistic approach and bring together
the right people, from industry to research to education. To integrate this so-
called Knowledge Triangle is at the heart of a KIC. For a startup this can mean,
for example, to fnd a frst customer amongst the industrial partners of a KIC,
or to gain access to investors through the KIC.
At EIT RawMaterials, the KIC and the world’s largest network in the raw
materials sector, startups play an important role when it comes to new ideas
from adjacent industries or on challenges that have not been solved by
established businesses.
Here are two examples:
1 A start-up that has developed an entirely new algorithm that will allow
maintaining mining machines in a much more time and cost efcient
manner than ever before. This new approach, which had not been applied in
the mining sector yet, can have a strong impact on the competitiveness of
European world-market leaders in the feld – many of them being part of EIT
RawMaterials today.
A diferent innovative solution is ofered by a startup in the
Circular Economy. Collection boxes in drugstore chains ofer a voucher
in exchange for e-waste that can be used either directly in the shop or later
online. This decentralised solution is tackling the identifcation and collection
parts of the value chain, which are much less developed and efcient than
the steps related to the actual recycling of e-waste.
By supporting the EUTOP50 initiative, EIT RawMaterials would like to
make an important contribution to the innovativeness of Europe. Our focus
is on the people, which is you, the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.
Dr Andreas Klossek
Chief Operations Ofcer,
Managing Director,
EIT Raw Materials
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