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Dutch Education minister Ingrid van Engelshoven and Economic Affairs secretary Mona Keijzer have allocated another 24 million euros to stimulate knowledge transfer from research to society and the market. Investors will be encouraged to back startups industrializing knowledge from research organizations. The government funding comes from the Thematic Technology Transfer (TTT) program and will be divided over three consortia of research organizations and venture capitalists: artificial intelligence, medtech and water technology, each receiving 8 million euros.
The TTT.AI consortium includes the universities of Amsterdam, Eindhoven, Nijmegen and Utrecht, the university medical centers from these cities and the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), the Dutch national research center for mathematics and computer science. Eindhoven-based Lumo Labs is managing the pre-seed fund. The consortium is complemented by many affiliated partners such as other technical universities, colleges, incubators, regional development agencies, the Dutch AI Coalition and the Innovation Center for Artificial Intelligence. The primary themes are healthcare, security and human-centered AI.
Within the medtech consortium, the technical universities of Delft, Eindhoven, Twente and Wageningen are joining forces with the Erasmus, Radboud and Maastricht University Medical Centers. Amsterdam-based Innovation Industries is their investment partner. Together, they plan to build a national open program to bring together the right knowledge and expertise in an early stage and to accelerate the commercialization of medtech innovations, eg for less stressful diagnoses and treatments.
The Netherlands Enabling Watertechnology consortium brings together the University of Groningen, the knowledge institutes Deltares and Wetsus and the NOM, the investment and development agency for the Northern Netherlands. By stimulating startups in their field, they aim to accelerate the transition to a circular, sustainable and climate-neutral economy. Example application areas are reuse of water and production and storage of energy from water.
