TETRACOM delivers four-fold return on EU tech transfer investment
TETRACOM coordinator Rainer Leupers, Professor of Communication Technologies and Embedded Systems at RWTH Aachen, commented: ‘Being a co-founder of several companies myself, I’m particularly glad that our project has also helped European start-ups get off the ground by transferring key technologies that contribute to the core of their product offer. I’m excited to see this level of industrial impact from a European project and I cordially wish them long-term market success.’ While the European Commission invests €25,000 per technology transfer project, TETRACOM will result in six-figure returns in cost reductions and new sales opportunities, according to many of the beneficiaries. Projects cover a range of fields of crucial importance to European industry, including communications and multimedia, industrial automation, health, safety and security, the automotive sector and data analytics. Among the examples of innovative technology generated thanks to TETRACOM funding are the following: • Turbo-charged genome analysis thanks to a high-performance computational infrastructure by TU Delft spin-off Bluebee, providing healthcare professionals with the tools they need to diagnose genetic diseases and prescribe personalized therapies. The Dutch company’s growing success was recently consolidated by €10 million in venture capital financing. • Faster video downloads thanks to an accelerated video decoder, resulting in a new product for Greek company Think Silicon and a new spin-off from TU Berlin, Spin Digital. • Heart monitoring via your smartphone offered by a wireless, wearable body sensor developed by the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana and commercialized by start-up Saving d.o.o. • Real-time sweat analysis for discreet health checks through the zero-power Lab-on-SkinTM created by the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne and start-up Xsensio. • Smart glass-cutting techniques enabled by the use of artificial intelligence to maximize glass production by Spanish SME AGC Flat Glass Ibérica while keeping energy consumption low, resulting in up to 40% performance improvements. David Rueda of AGC Flat Glass Ibérica commented: ‘The project has been very profitable for us. The optimization reduces losses and increases our competitiveness in the market. In gross numbers, we can save around €150,000 a year.’ In a further indication of TETRACOM’s central position within the Digitising European Industry initiative, the project was hailed as a ‘best practice’ at the recent Smart Anything Everywhere workshop on enhancing digital transformation, held in Brussels. Further information: www.tetracom.eu Contact: Rainer Leupers, TETRACOM coordinator leupers@ice.rwth-aachen.de About TETRACOM A three-year project which started in September 2013, the mission of the TETRACOM Coordination Action is to boost European academia-to-industry technology transfer (TT) in all domains of Computing Systems. While many other European and national initiatives focus on training of entrepreneurs and support for start-up companies, the key differentiator of TETRACOM is a novel instrument called Technology Transfer Project (TTP). TTPs help to lower the barrier for researchers to make the first steps towards commercialization of their research results.
Keywords
technology transfer, computing systems, genome, decoder, ecg, lab-on-skin, smart, automation, digitising industry
Countries
Belgium, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Finland, France, Croatia, Italy, Netherlands, Romania, Sweden, Slovenia, United Kingdom