There were smiles all around when the founders behind DTU start-up Clair Scientific took the stage last Friday at the Danish Tech Challenge award show to receive the Danish Industry Foundation’s Entrepreneur Award of DKK 500,000. The award was the culmination of five months’ hard work, during which the start-up competed against 19 other promising hardware start-ups in Denmark.
The DTU start-up won the competition for their development of a new microscope based on a completely new patented imaging technology. Moreover, the microscope is half the size of ordinary microscopes and costs only a fourth their price. This will make it possible for everyone to make new discoveries in life science. In this way, more new technologies and pharmaceuticals can reach the market faster and benefit people all over the world.
Today, it is often associated with huge expenses when small and medium-sized life science companies and talented researchers purchase new laboratory equipment. And this becomes a barrier to new innovative discoveries.
“We are completely overwhelmed and surprised. It has been a great experience to participate in Danish Tech Challenge and to be allowed to pitch our product on stage. The plan now is to spend money hiring more people who can help us increase sales. We have a product, and now we need to reach as many people as possible. As researchers, we have personal experience with needing something that works without having to pay too much. We have had to run laboratories and purchase equipment for them. That’s why we developed something that would have benefitted us in the same situation,” says Hugh Simons, Associate Professor at DTU Physics, who is one of the founders of Clair Scientific.
Danish Tech Challenge is part of DTU’s innovation system
The driving force behind Danish Tech Challenge is The Danish Industry Foundation and one of DTU’s subsidiaries, DTU Science Park. Every year, more than 100 hardware start-ups apply to join Danish Tech Challenge, which has helped 200 technology-intensive hardware entrepreneurs develop and grow since 2014.
For most of these, it has gone really well. Of all the previous years’ participants, 81 per cent of the companies are still active and have together created around 1,500 jobs. In addition, just over a tenth of the companies are currently estimated to be worth more than DKK 100 million.
The entrepreneurial environment in Danish Tech Challenge simultaneously helps to promote entrepreneurship at DTU. DTU has one of the most well-developed ecosystems for innovation and entrepreneurship among technical universities in Europe. This ecosystem helps bring new ideas and inventions from the classrooms and research laboratories at DTU into the real world, where it can create new jobs and help solve tasks and challenges in society.
