Big Industry drawn to DCU Innovation hub
Big Industry drawn to DCU Innovation hub
Dublin doesn’t lack for technology accelerators and incubation spaces, but almost all of them focus on software and internet technology; what makes the DCU Innovation Campus different is a focus on physical devices and hardware.
Occupying a 10-acre site with 200,000 sq feet of mixed-use buildings such as labs, workshops and office space, the facility is squarely aimed at companies looking to carry out design, product development, prototyping and iteration of physical products.
Since opening its doors in January 2013, the facility has amassed close to 30 companies. The campus has major tenants focusing on three aspects of societies and economies: Siemens for technology, Veolia for energy and Fujitsu for health. Orbiting these multinationals are local start-ups, SMEs and university spin-outs, working on a range of different product types such as LED technology for streetlights and gas-sensing systems for landfill sites.
Names to watch out for include Shimmer Sensing, which produces wearable biometric sensors for monitoring elite athlete performance; Novaerus has developed a device that scrubs the air of pathogens in healthcare environments; Exergyn has a small, green waste-heat recovery engine; VSP Global works on smart eyewear and LayerLabz manufactures 3D printers.
“All of them have in common the desire to be co-located with a research-intensive university that can give access to specific technologies and researchers in DCU,” explains Ronan Furlong, executive director of the campus.
Aiming to achieve a cluster effect, campus management actively curates the roster of companies to ensure cross-pollination of ideas between them. “We would be very conscious of all of the different technologies under development down here and the opportunities that might accrue from those technologies, and figuring out how those other companies could benefit from them,” explains Furlong. “We are actively stirring that pot as opposed to throwing everything in and hoping for the best.”
Another role of the Innovation Campus is to provide a support ecosystem such as running hackathon events to brainstorm hardware ideas around a particular industry. Over a weekend in late March, a beef hackathon focused on ways of making food processing safer, more sustainable, and more energy-efficient, and on bringing lean concepts to meat processing.
“They’re not just esoteric events: we have two tenant companies here that have their genesis in the hackathon series,” Furlong says. “They’re very interesting fora for hardware innovation. People go from a 60-second pitch to a physical working prototype 54 hours later and can then ultimately become a company or a technology.”
A key metric for the success of the Innovation Campus will be the extent of the collaboration that results from potentially complementary companies being in close proximity to one another, Furlong says. “You might have a small IT company that gets to talk to a big energy company. When you overlay what the university is good at, it’s about the interesting things that happen in the gaps.”