#ENRIITCyourCoffee S4 E6 on TechConnect Europe and the Big Science Facilities Summit

Welcome to the recap of #ENRIITCyourCoffee season 4 episode 6 on TechConnect Europe presented to you by Dalia Yablon, Senior Advisor at TechConnect. ENRIITC is an associated partner of TechConnect and we help the organising committee set up activities. TechConnect was also the place for an ENRIITC physical meetup, that you can read more about here.

Dalia starts off by introducing the innovation-focused event series originating from the United States. TechConnect is a research and innovation event and a media leader with more than 20 years of experience connecting emerging technologies with unique funding and partnership opportunities. TechConnect Europe (TCE) is the inaugural European event in the line of TechConnect events. While 2021 saw the 24^th TechConnect in the US, this was the first in Europe on 15-17 November 2021.

TechConnect is a unique meeting designed to accelerate the commercialisation of innovations out of labs into industry.

Dalia expands on the early days of TechConnect in the 1990’ when it was more nanotech focused since the founders – Matt Louden and Bart Romanowitz – were heavily involved in nanotech research and tried to get a forum for people engaged in that field of research. In general, TechConnect consists of 2 parts: the technical and the innovation spotlight section of the event.

1. The technical program for researchers to present their more applied work. This year the technical program has three main focus points:

Advanced materials
Biotech
Energy

2. Innovation spotlight (more thematic i.e advanced materials etc) where corporate or national labs have an overview of what they are looking for and start-ups or academic groups can pitch to them and everyone gets some short feedback.

The technical programme and innovation spotlight run in parallel and there is a lot of crossover and synergy between the two tracks.

The Big Science Facility Summit is an addition to the TechConnect event, which is done in every few years in the United States and the organisers decided to add that to the inaugural European event. The focus there is on the keynotes and Dalia was excited about bringing the whole innovation pipeline together in the workshops organised on site.

Listen to Dalia elaborate on the workshop schedule on the recording starting at 09:15.

Watch the recording below.