R2B Live Team Looking for New Talents

The participation at the first STARTup Live RhineValley was a great success for our team. Having worked on the powerful seawater desalination technology within KIT’s pilot project “Research to Business Live”, we could double in number throughout the weekend to a total of eight young and active entrepreneurs. Our great new members have strong backgrounds mostly in the fields of Business, Economics and Marketing.

During the three days, we worked on market analyses for drinking water in developing countries. Additionally, “97percent” was chosen for our name. Two groups of mentors assisted us, both by giving creative input and asking loads of new questions. Furthermore, they led us into the direction of developing a business model and constructing a virtual prototype of a portable seawater desalination device for decentralised water supply.

The independent jury consisting of start-up gurus and technology experts was convinced by the strong presentation of our team, ideas and huge progress in just about 50 hours. That is why we were awarded a great team building event as well as a professional idea assessment from KIC InnoEnergy. We are not only very grateful for their choice, but also to each individual member of our team. Without your enthusiasm and hard work we couldn’t have achieved even half of what we were able to!

Currently, we are working together with the Innovation Management Department and finest researchers of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology on a concept to get the unique project to the next level. Recent meetings led to the decision of providing new jobs for research assistants and a combined workshop for business students. Needless to say, young chemists and chemical engineers are more than welcome to join us. They will have the golden opportunity to do research in the fascinating field of polyelectrolytes supervised by world-renowned scientists and probably even to find new possibilities for this exciting technology.

If you are interested to join in, feel welcome to get in touch with us.
The contact person for you is: Stefan Marinov, e-mail: stefan marinov∂pioniergarage de

Press releases:

• KIT: Karlsruhe Entrepreneurial Scene: Technology goes Business
  Introduction to the project “Research to Business LIVE” (in German)
• KIT: R2B Live Team wins Energy-Award at the STARTup Live RhineValley
  Information about our award (in German)

Research to Business – Live

Together with CyberForum and the Innovation Management Department of KIT, we started a new initiative: Research to Business – Live.

Since there’s a huge potential of innovation projects at KIT, we decided to try generating business models based on some of the available cutting edge technologies. The aim is, of course, founding new start-ups.

So far we managed to:

• choose one of five technologies – a new method for desalination of sea water;
• put together a team of four pioneers: Axel Grünert, Daniel Reinhardt, Stefan Marinov and Christina Horn;
• schedule a meeting with the inventors of the technology in order to introduce it to the students.

The team will also participate in STARTup Live RhineValley! If you want to meet them, register here!

Update 08.09.2011

The meeting with the inventors went very well. The technology is really sick and complicated but everybody got a basic understanding.

Update 13.09.2011

Yesterday, we worked on the fundamentals of the business model. On Thursday, we’ll continue with mentors of the Cyberforum (www.cyberforum.de).

Press:

• Baden TV starting around 9:30 (in German)
• Article on www.Business-On.de (in German)
• Article on www.uni-online.de (in German)
• Article on www.kit.edu (in German)