Government supports researchers looking to bring inventions to market

The two-year programme, called Faculty of Impact, is half a business administration course, and half individual guidance on setting up a company. Research funder NWO will choose the participants with the help of experts.

Patents
The scientists will be taught about patents, how to start a company, and how to improve their presentation skills, among other things. The teachers will be entrepreneurs, financial experts and lawyers who will help the participants explore the market and seek funding.

This is not a new programme. NWO has been running a pilot for the Faculty of Impact for two years. The first ten participants have completed the programme and the second batch of scientists, comprised of 14 people, has been enrolled for almost a year.

One of them has come up with a technique to extract CO2 from seawater and then use it to grow vegetables. Another has developed a pill-sized camera that can detect oesophageal cancer at an early stage. A third is trying to get a factory off the ground to produce batteries without rare metals like lithium.

Promising
According to the Minister of Education, Eppo Bruins, the results are promising. His ministry will fund the programme for seven years with a total of 19.39 million euros. This will allow about a hundred scientists to follow the programme in the next seven years.

The programme was inspired by a similar initiative from the University of California, Berkely, which was first brought to the Netherlands in 2022 by the association of Dutch universities (UNL), NWO and Techleap, an organisation that supports tech startups.

Since 2011, the European Research Council ERC has given 150,000 euros worth of proof of concept grants to scientists working on practical applications for their research. They spend those grants individually.