July started with one more Tech Demo Day organised by the EIC Tech to Market (T2M) Venture Building Programme, in collaboration with the EIC Programme Manager on Energy systems and green technologies, Antonio Marco Pantaleo. EIC Pathfinder and EIC Transition projects pitched their innovations to a diversified panel of experts.
The EIC T2M Venture Building Programme aims at helping to build start-ups to exploit promising research results through venture building services. For Antonio Marco Pantaleo, programmes like this “are very important to help scientists and investors to go out of their comfort zone and understand the challenges and needs to transfer visionary research into breakthrough innovation”. Keep reading to know more about this Tech Demo Day and what this experience meant for beneficiaries and experts.
Improving the pitching skills
We spoke with Dahnan Spurling, from Trinity College Dublin, representing the project Super-HEART, and with Paula Dias, from the University of Porto, representing the project 112CO2.
Super-HEART is an energy hub connecting the grid, onsite renewables, and energy storage to critical, high-power loads such as data centres or net zero energy buildings. It aims to facilitate green hydrogen energy storage for both backup power and load management.
The 112CO2 project already has a spin-off company - Pixel Voltaic. The company is developing a unique low-temperature catalytic methane decomposition process that allows to produce clean hydrogen and solid carbon, both with high commercial value. It can produce hydrogen and carbon nanofibers and nanotubes with zero direct CO2 emissions and at more competitive prices.
Both Dahnan and Paula stated that this first phase of the Programme was extremely beneficial and helped them improve their pitching skills. “In the pitching session, we had the chance to get diversified feedback and to reply to good questions we got from the panel of experts that will later serve to improve the whole business and communication strategies of our technology.”, said Paula. Dahnan added that the questions from the experts “helped focus the pitch, showing which elements were unclear or prone to misunderstanding, as well as demonstrating which aspects we need to emphasise more in the future”, which for him was of particular value as some things might not be so clear to non-technical audiences.
The individual support session prior to the Tech Demo Day was also one of the aspects that Dahnan considered to be the most helpful, as it gave the Super-HEART team detailed feedback from an expert in the field, who had time to gain a deeper understanding of the project. On the Tech Demo Day, “the feedback received from the experts was also interesting, given the broad backgrounds and lack of ex-ante knowledge of the project. It was illuminating in terms of how to present Super-HEART to audiences who had a scant few minutes to understand the purpose and potential of the project.”, said Dahnan.
In line with this view, Paula also considered the feedback from the experts highly relevant, “as it helped us to improve our business strategy and improve the fitting of our technological advances. Moreover, it was critical to validate if our message reaches people with different backgrounds like investors, technology experts, venture builders, or even the general society”.
By participating in the Programme, Paula and her team aim to “measure our perception of the strategy we have been following so far, and also to get to know our team better when exposed to challenges raised by people outside of our comfort zone.”. According to their perspective, this will allow them to grow as a team and to learn skills that typically people coming from academia are not aware of.
For Dahnan, the Programme “should help us better pitch Super-HEART, and help us create a strong, multidisciplinary team. We hope the team creation phase will help us identify our current strengths and weaknesses, as well as allow access to external talent whose expertise can help Super-HEART make that critical jump from lab to market”.
Both projects moved to the Team Creation phase in the Programme, where the needs of the projects in terms of human resources will be identified, and where they will undergo tailor-made scouting for new team members according to each project’s needs.
Experts’ point of view
The Tech Demo Day on Energy systems and green technologies counted with a panel of 12 experts, including academics, investors, corporate representatives, and EIC business coaches. We talked with 2 experts: Anne Lebreton-Wolf, Founder of ALW Finance & Innovation, and Samuel Le Berre, Engineer, Designer and Innovation Expert at A.Samble.
Anne expressed her happiness in seeing innovation stemming from all over Europe, and she thinks it is important to mix research and business mindsets in the early stages of the projects. For her, programmes like the EIC Tech to Market Venture Building are “essential to keep on fostering science-related entrepreneurship in Europe and, in this field, to speed up on energy transition.”.
Samuel agrees that “it is key to have such programmes to bridge academia and entrepreneurship. The transition from tech to market involves a total change of mindset from scientific research to business. It is an existing transformation but that needs the appropriate support to bear fruits.”.
Due to his background, Samuel, with his questions and feedback during the event, aimed to “challenge the projects on value-based and user-centred approaches. I also encouraged the projects’ representatives to clarify their positioning in the value chain of their technologies”.
If you have an EIC-funded project and you are interested in participating in future Tech Demo Days, read more and apply here.
About the EIC Tech to Market (T2M) Venture Building Programme
The EIC Tech to Market Venture Building Programme aims to help build start-ups to exploit promising research results through venture building services, comprising a range of activities from identification of promising business ideas to venture creation and development.
Need help?
For additional information, please refer to our helpdesk by choosing “EIC T2M Venture Building Programme” as the subject.
DISCLAIMER: This information is provided in the interest of knowledge sharing and should not be interpreted as the official view of the European Commission, or any other organisation.