In a new book, DTU opens the doors to the innovation hub DTU Skylab. The text below about the DTU X-Tech Entrepreneurship programme is part of this book written by Peter Aagaard Brixen.
“Our MSc students are truly impressive, and their capabilities never fail to amaze me. They’re put into mixed disciplinary teams and fulfil their roles as competent and creative engineers in their various disciplines,” says Associate Professor Thomas Howard from DTU Entrepreneurship.
Each year, he forms teams out of a total of 200 DTU and Copenhagen Business School students, who join DTU’s X-Tech Entrepreneurship course. The course is a semester-long, technology-based course incubator at DTU Skylab, aiming to match teams of MSc in Engineering students from a variety of different backgrounds with technologies, inventions, patents, and the needs of companies.
“DTU is a top-flight technical university, so we have interesting projects, good technology, and good scientists involved in the cases. If we assign MSc students to an audio-related project, you can bet your life by the end of the course they will actually have produced some kind of working speaker with a distinct value proposition. The variety of projects they take on is impressive, from new payloads for drones which can measure river depths, to new nutritional supplements made from algae, like the two startup projects Caelimetrics and Nordic Algae. They don’t just deliver an idea, sketch, or a PowerPoint presentation, they actually get their hands dirty and develop their products and markets like real tech startups with the skills, capabilities, and motivation to get it done,” says Thomas Howard.
"The variety of projects they take on is impressive, from new payloads for drones which can measure river depths, to new nutritional supplements made from algae."
Thomas J Howard, Associate Professor & Head of Impact Lab
X-Tech Entrepreneurship is split into thematic focus areas like life science-tech, ehealth-tech, water-tech, food and agriculture-tech, audio-tech, clean-tech, and so on. The tracks are sponsored by companies, whose involvement includes setting specific projects as well as providing technical and commercial mentoring.
“I want them to actually be able to start up a business. Either they do it now, or they’ll be able to do it in the future. We take them as far as we can through the process, so they know how to do it. We run the course like a professional incubator, similar to the Danish Tech Challenge. It’s a great learning experience, and every year around 25 per cent of the projects either get funding or want to carry on towards a startup company after the course,” says Thomas Howard.