DTU Skylab Annual Report 2023 by DTUdk

DTU SKYLAB

Annual report - 2023

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Recordbreaking year,

it’s a great privilege for me to welcome you to our official look back on all the things we achieved together in 2023. The last time we did a booklet like this was in 2019. Back then, I wrote that it had been another tremendously busy year for the community at DTU Skylab. Although it has been quite some years since the last booklet, the foreword from back then is still relevant. It’s been yet another tremendously busy year— even a record-breaking one!

DTU Skylab welcomed, on average, 500 people a day, which is the highest level of activity we have ever recorded. The staff supported an all-time high 360 start-up projects in 2023, and the brilliant minds of DTU students and employees have created 81 brand-new start-ups.

We hosted 114 events, collaborated with 43 external companies, helped facilitate academic courses, and supported 1210 students in our in-house labs and

workshops. We went to TechBBQ and the Digital Tech Summit, where DTU Skylab staff won a Diversity Award for the projects ‘Unbiased’ and ‘Scaling Unbiased’. The projects aimed to provide a toolbox to combat the challenges women face when securing venture capital.

In 2023, we took DTU Skylab and once more positioned ourselves in international contexts. Together with UnternehmerTUM, we co-founded the initiative ‘RISE Europe,’ a European network of leading start-up and innovation ecosystems. The network aims to support European start-ups in making a global impact and establishing easier access to the European market.

Together with PreSeed Ventures we launched the climate tech initiative DTU Earthbound. With DTU Earthbound, we seek to motivate and turbocharge the development of even more Danish climate tech start-ups.

So, it’s definitely been a tremendously busy year once again at DTU Skylab—and 2024 doesn’t seem to be less busy, but equally exciting.

Mikkel Sørensen Director of DTU Skylab

Record-breaking year

Who we are

Diversity and cross-disciplinarity

Building competencies

Creating impact on society

Meet the startups

Empowering deep tech entrepreneurs

Inclusion and international collaboration

DTU Skylab in numbers

DTU Skylab 2023 recap movie

Who we are

DTU Skylab is DTU’s innovation hub. We offer facilities, coaching, programmes and, not least, access to a community and a broader ecosystem. These elements constitute an environment that fosters innovation through new products, processes, start-ups, etc., as well as a learning environment that enables future innovation and societal impact. We see the role of DTU Skylab as a direct support of DTU’s mission of developing and applying the natural and technical sciences for the benefit of society. Also, this environment promotes DTU’s strategic objective of providing Europe’s best engineering education.

Thus, DTU Skylab is working with innovation on three levels >>

Impact

Maturing innovation projects and supporting the creation of new businesses to benefit society.

Competencies

Introducing tools, developing skills, and building competencies through hands-on innovation activities for both students and researchers.

Culture

Fostering an open innovation culture across and beyond DTU.

Diversity and crossdisciplinarity

Throughout 2023, our Developer Hall served as a true melting pot for all the cross-disciplinary activities at DTU Skylab. Start-ups from a wide variety of exciting and diverse ranges of deep tech start-ups were constantly working on everything from next-generation ‘plaster’ casts using 3D-printed smart materials to heal broken limbs, time-saving robots targeted at hospitals that save precious time for nurses, innovative education-tech that inspires more students to choose the STEM disciplines, to fantastic student projects building space rockets and an electrified race car.

Award for empowering female entrepreneurs

Together with We Promote Women and DTU Compute, we developed and ran the projects ‘Unbiased’ and ‘Scaling Unbiased’. The goal was to strengthen women entrepreneurs’ opportunities to get a larger share of the venture capital pool through a simple, targeted curriculum that enables them to respond proactively to the questions they are asked by potential investors. The project won the Foundation for Entrepreneurship’s Diversity Award.

Building competencies

DTU Skylab Projects

Next Generation [ ] Action

An annual global initiative that invited 129 young students, researchers, and entrepreneurs to join a three-week hybrid innovation course and eight days in Copenhagen to bring ideas, perspectives, and action into the UIA2023 Congress.

Open Innovation

Extracurricular innovation programme that united 115 students across Danish universities to turn real-world challenges from industry partners into sustainable innovations.

Technology Leaving No

One Behind Explore Ecotrophelia

The partnership provides opportunities and supports spanning research, education, and entrepreneurship to make inclusion and accessibility a natural part of engineering new technological solutions.

A practical hands-on project and course where student groups invent innovative sustainable food or drinks, produce prototypes and take part in the Danish Ecotrophelia competition.

A biannual programme that in 2023 brought together 80 students across universities to explore and immerse themselves in entrepreneurship and innovation through five activities over two months to spark future innovators and start-up teams.

Minisprint

Connecting students and industry experts for a oneday hands-on facilitated experience on how to turn an industry challenge into ideas for sustainability, using DTU Skylab design tools.

Creating impact on society

Supporting innovative start-ups is what we breathe and live for at DTU Skylab. And 2023 was no exception to the core of DTU’s innovation hub.

In fact, we not only achieved new milestones, but even set a new pace for the future of the support of both student and research-based start-ups.

Startup support

We hit a record of 360 start-up teams who received coaching from our in-house specialists.

We paved the way for soft funding that helped 21 student-based start-ups with a record-breaking DKK 1.918m from funding partners through our programme Skylab Funding, our support programme tailored to the very first stages of a start-up venture for student teams.

We helped 72 research-based start-ups amass more than DKK 36m in funding from

Discovery grants, Proof of Concept grants, and InnoExplorer grants.

Powerful mentoring and nurturing innovation culture at DTU

Our pre-start-up mentoring programme reached more than 180 active mentors from the industry who, throughout 2023, have helped more than 50 teams with unique guidance and crucial knowledge sharing.

We launched new Fireside talks, innovation seminars and entrepreneurial training targeted at DTU researchers, where we shared expertise about what DTU-start-ups mean, thereby cultivating the innovation culture directly at DTU departments. Nurturing the innovation culture is of high importance if we are to maintain the position as the best university in Denmark for establishing new businesses.

Boosting climate tech with DTU Earthbound

2023 was also the year when we launched the climate tech catalyst DTU Earthbound. Our world needs new climate tech solutions if we are to stabilize climate change before 2050. Currently, DTU Earthbound is vetting 17 exciting cases that all have great potential to help us protect and halt climate change. Learn more about DTU Earthbound >>

Developing the next big thing at DTU Risø Campus

Coming off the completion of the Power-To-X Risø project, we facilitated collaboration between researchers from DTU Risø and external SMEs in order to underline DTU Risø’s future position as a hotspot for innovative Power-to-X technologies. The experiences from the project serve as one of the pillars of the expansion of DTU Risø. Learn more about Power-to-X >>

Meet the startups Startup cases

> Perfi

Revolutionizing devices through VAM, an innovative, ultra-fast 3D printing.

> DemensAI

Detecting dementia through conversation.

> DiaSense

Unlocking mysteries of the brain with quantum sensing.

> Meat Tomorrow

A cultivated meat company enabling the production of sustainable pork.

> NitroVolt

Electrifying and decentralizing ammonia production.

> Uvisa

Developing non-pharmacological solutions for women’s intimate health.

Empowering deep tech entrepreneurs

Europe has great potential for raising its innovation levels to those of, e.g., the US and China. The key to realizing that ambition lies in creating rocksolid partnerships between dynamic entrepreneurship hubs from all over Europe, which is why DTU Skylab 2023 co-founded the network RISE Europe. A network that empowers European start-ups to make a positive global impact on some of the world’s biggest challenges.

Massive attention on the blueprint of DTU Skylab

We had 97 visits to our hub last year, including visits and knowledge sharing with institutions like MIT and ambassadors from all over the world—all eager to dive into the experiences of building an innovation hub, what it takes to improve

it further, and how to create impact. The visits have indeed proven beneficial to the start-ups working at DTU Skylab, since the exposure to decision-makers helps get the voices of the start-ups heard.

The DTU ecosystem

DTU Startup Day 2023 gathered the whole innovation ecosystem (DTU Entrepreneurship, DTU Science Park, DTU Skylab, and PreSeed Ventures) at DTU to showcase one big cohort of exciting deep tech start-ups. The event was quickly sold out, with 700 investors, founders, entrepreneurs, and tech aficionados attendees stopping by to make new connections and experience the technology of tomorrow in one single day.

Inclusion and international collaboration

In 2023, DTU Skylab embarked on a journey where innovation met inclusion head-on, launching ‘Technology Leaving No One Behind’ 2.0, which marked an exciting initiative for propelling technology that empowers all people, no matter their abilities. In 2022, we saw the launch of the Universal Design Playbook—an educational toolbox for helping designers and entrepreneurs weave true inclusivity into future innovative solutions. 2023 was the year when the toolbox went viral with the help of UX superstars such as Vitaly Friedman, and it has now reached 114 countries.

We broke records with our close university collaborators through our student innovation challenges EXPLORE and Open Innovation. Both programmes set new benchmarks for participation. The 2023 edition of Open Innovation triumphed with no less than 115 cross-disciplinary students coming from diverse academic

backgrounds from DTU, Copenhagen Business School, and the University of Copenhagen.

In 2023, we again went abroad and connected with other universities from around the world. And we yet again sought to come up with new solutions for sustainable cities through our Next Generation [ ] Action programme, where we engaged both virtually and physically with 129 young talents, entrepreneurs, and researchers from Korea, India, South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Denmark, Colombia, and Mexico in a global innovation journey— touring both the UIA World Congress of Architects and the P4G Summit in Colombia.