He presented the challenges startups are facing on their way from research to market and the services supporting their endeavors. A special focus was put on the support measures offered by the EU-funded projects “TESLA” and “LILA”.

The TESLA project consists of ten targeted initiatives aimed at helping high potential technology companies to internationalize more quickly, identifying new product development opportuni-ties in global markets.

The LILA project is based on the Living Labs approach involving users in the product development process. For the first time, LILA realizes Living Labs at a transnational level with users from 6 regions in Europe. Users participate to validate and co-design innovative products or services in order to adapt projects to their local market needs.

Furthermore, two young entrepreneurs presented their start-up ideas and highlighted their motivation building their own career opportunities:
“FAST MRO”, a spin-off activity from DFKI in Kaiserslautern commercializing an Augmented Reality Maintenance Information System, was presented by Nils Petersen, and
“cross-connected”, an interactive high-end 3D visualisation system as start-up initiative from Karlsruhe University, was presented by Andreas Rüdenauer from RST (Rüdenauer Software Technologies).