“Thuringian Innovation Hubs” aim to promote innovative startups

Jena / Ilmenau / July 23, 2024

The Center of Excellence in Photonics in Jena, together with the Center of Excellence InSignA in Ilmenau, can look forward to receiving 4.2 million euros in funding from the Free State of Thuringia and the Thuringian Ministry of Economic Affairs, Science and Digital Society for the “Thuringian Innovation Hubs”. The newly founded association is intended to support innovative startups in the transfer of knowledge and technology. It assists both spin-offs from science and collaborations between external startups and scientific institutions in Jena and Ilmenau. 

Promoting new ideas, supporting entrepreneurial spirit, and further developing Thuringia as a location for innovation - that is the vision of the “Thuringian Innovation Hubs”. They are a new cooperation between the Center of Excellence in Photonics, managed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF in Jena, and the Center of Excellence InSignA, coordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT in Ilmenau. The project is being funded by the Free State of Thuringia and the Thuringian Ministry of Economic Affairs, Science and Digital Society (TMWWDG) with a volume of 4.2 million euros until 2026.

From the idea to a successful startup

The Center of Excellence in Photonics promotes the transfer of new ideas and research designs from the field of optics and photonics into concrete applications. An important player in this project is the Digital Innovations Hub Photonics (DIHP). Since 2019, the DIHP has been supporting the transfer of technology from science to industry, particularly through innovative (spin-off) startups and collaborations between regional, national, and international startups and science in Jena, especially in the future-oriented key technologies of optics and photonics.

This expertise in the transfer of knowledge and technologies from and with startups has been extended to the Ilmenau site in recent years. Here, the “InSignA Innovation HUB” (iHUB) acts as a sister project to the DIHP in Jena.

The cooperation is now to be intensified in order to further strengthen the innovation landscape in the region. To this end, the merger of the two performance centers in Jena and Ilmenau and their startup platforms DIHP and iHUB is intended to promote young companies in the development of marketable products in the future. This includes raising awareness, supporting, and accompanying the knowledge and technology transfer of research results in the environment of the two Fraunhofer Institutes.

DIHP and iHUB develop success stories

As part of thematically focused ideas competitions, so-called “Elevator Pitches” at the DIHP and iHUB, researchers, start-up teams and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are invited to present their visions in the field of optics and photonics or intelligent signal analysis and assistance systems to a highly qualified jury. The successful teams will each receive research budgets of up to four person-months for their winning ideas. This means that the ideas will be researched at the participating universities and research institutes in Jena and Ilmenau, respectively, with a full-time position of four months.

Some of the successes of the spin-offs and external companies in the fields of optics, photonics and quantum technologies to date show just how groundbreaking the support provided by the Centers of Excellence and their Innovation Hubs can be. Twelve new companies have been founded in Thuringia alone thanks to the support of the DIHP, including Quantum Optics GmbH, IDloop GmbH and SPACEOPTIX GmbH.

Fraunhofer startups support climate research from space

The latter were successful in the elevator pitches in January 2020 as a pure idea team. Together with the constellR idea team from Fraunhofer EMI in Freiburg im Breisgau, which later spun off as constellR GmbH, SPACEOPTIX successfully worked on the development of a telescope that can measure the Earth's surface temperature from space. Both startups are using their research budgets to collaborate with the Fraunhofer IOF's Optical and Mechanical System Design and Precision Optical Components and Systems departments. For their cooperation, the startups and their institutes of origin received the Fraunhofer Prize for Human- and Environment-Centered Technology 2023.

The iHUB from Ilmenau has also already been able to support the further development of 17 startup teams, such as eCeramix GmbH and BattSense.

Partners in the Jena DIHP

The Digital Innovation Hub Photonics (DIHP) is a consortium project with the Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology (Leibniz IPHT), the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology - Hans Knöll Institute (Leibniz HKI), the Helmholtz Institute Jena (HI-J) and the Abbe Center of Photonics (ACP) of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the Ernst Abbe University of Applied Sciences (EAH) Jena as well as Fraunhofer IOF.