Stimulating Innovation and Entrepreneurship – Aspiring Scientists Visit Sartorius

Göttingen, May 17, 2018 – As part of the Young Entrepreneurs in Science program, 19 aspiring scientists learned how ideas can be turned into innovations at Sartorius. During their visit at Sartorius Campus, Ph.D. students and post-doctoral scientists teamed up with Sartorius staff to develop proposals on how the company could interact with customers in the future and what the Sartorius lab of tomorrow could look like.

Launched at the end of 2017, the further education program Young Entrepreneurs in Science is designed to promote entrepreneurial thinking in university studies and strengthen Germany as a hub of innovation and entrepreneurship by accelerating the transfer of research results from the lab to the market. Young Entrepreneurs in Science is an initiative of the Falling Walls Foundation and is supported by the German Ministry for Education and Research, a number of universities, such as the University of Göttingen, and foundations, which include southern Lower Saxony’s InnovationCampus, SNIC. Sartorius is an industrial partner of the educational program for which Göttingen is one of its pilot sites.

“We need more university startups in Germany. Although we cannot instruct this to happen, we can create a better basis and a culture to encourage this activity. The potential for startups is extremely high as institutes and research facilities are continuously developing new technologies and processes. What is often lacking are the entrepreneurial tools of the trade. Supporting the Young Entrepreneurs in Science initiative is a component of Sartorius’ activities to promote startups in the life science sector,” commented Sartorius CEO Joachim Kreuzburg.

The 19 young men and women hail from many universities and institutes, such as the Universities of Göttingen and Kassel in north-central Germany, RTWH Aachen University in Aix-La-Chapelle in western Germany one of the Max-Planck Institutes, and work in scientific disciplines, for instance, biology, medicine, economics or agricultural sciences. The winning teams of this competition for ideas will be invited to attend the international Falling Walls Conference in Berlin, which is also supported by Sartorius.