Featuring presentations, social events, prize awards and panel discussions, “future talk” was the communicative centerpiece of the Research and Innovation exhibition at the CEBIT fair in Hannover. Investors, technology partners and end users: the Research & Innovation showcase was a must-see for anyone with an interest in cutting-edge ICT. On Friday, March 14th, Dr. h.c. Wolfgang Kniejski moderated the future talk session “Do it yourself – startups from research institutes and universities in the Software Cluster Darmstadt”.

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).