Nordic Life Science 1
t’s been a year since the launch of the Centre fo
r Technology Entrepreneurship at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). The university creates an average of 115 new companies a year, based on a 2018 analysis, and DTU Entrepreneurship plans to build on that startup success. What is it doing to keep the momentum going? “We’re giving students an entrepreneurial mindset and toolset,” says DTU Associate Professor Thomas Howard, “to get them to think about 28 commercialization from the beginning of their project.” A major focus at DTU Entrepreneurship is facilitating interactions, for example among external entrepreneurs, DTU engineers and students, and the Copenhagen Business School. The approach of bringing people with different experiences together in an entrepreneurial ecosystem is rooted in collaborations with the University of California Berkeley Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology, where students learn about the mindset and process of commercializing an idea. Training emphasizes working in diverse teams and getting practical experience. The origin story of DTU Entrepreneurship includes this Berkeley model. In 2012, Howard and Jes Broeng, now director of DTU Entrepreneurship, collaborated on a project centered on DTU patents with startup potential. This work earned a 2014 DTU Innovation Prize for Howard, who founded MASH Energy, which generates fuel and other resources from waste. NORDICLIFESCIENCE.ORG