For years, the Innovation Day NEULAND has been an integral part of the KIT calendar and of many people interested in technology and start-ups. On June 30, the Innovation Day took place for the first time in a purely virtual format for spectators. In digital lectures and exciting livestreams, this year's Innovation Day offered a diverse and varied program, which was well received by a record number of about 1,200 digital guests. The eventful day was rounded off by a virtual 3D environment where participants could extensively inform and exchange information in the networking lounge or at booths of sponsors, start-up projects, and technologies of KIT. More information can be found here.

"At Innovation Day, we at KIT can get in touch with our community from business and science, but also involve our students," said Prof. Dr. Thomas Hirth, Vice President for Innovation and International Affairs at KIT, at the official opening together with Dr. Thomas Schneider, Managing Director Development at TRUMPF Werkzeugmaschinen GmbH + Co. KG.

The first keynote of the day was given by Dr. Robert Bauer, Chairman of the Executive Board of SICK AG, on the topic of "Sensor intelligence: Driver of the digital transformation". In his presentation, Dr. Bauer addressed the question of how SICK AG is developing in the course of the digital transformation. In doing so, he showed how and for what purpose SICK AG is using sensor intelligence to try to build bridges between innovations in specific fields of expertise and how digital transformation has also been anchored in the company's corporate culture.

Following the keynote, there was reason to celebrate at the award ceremony of the NEULAND innovation competition: The winners of the two categories "Idea Award" and "Transfer Award" were announced. First place in the Idea Award was won by Prof. Dr. Ute Schepers, Institute of Functional Interfaces (IFG), Prof. Dr. Pavel Levkin, Institute of Organic Chemistry (IOC) and Institute of Biological and Chemical Systems - Functional Molecular Systems (IBCS-FMS) and Prof. Dr. Stefan Bräse from the Institute of Organic Chemistry (IOC) for their project "LONGCOVIDMA: High-throughput assay for new efficient drugs against long-covid and covid-19 brain infections". First place in the Transfer Prize went to a spin-off of KIT called Aquarray GmbH for the development of their droplet microarray technology.

More information on the nominees is available here.

After the lunch break, the founder pitch of KIT-Gründerschmiede took place, in which two international teams from Chile were allowed to prove themselves for the first time this year. The teams of Catavis, femfeel, GoQuantum (Chile), MARA, safeAD and Suncast (Chile) had only three minutes to score with their business idea. An expert jury, consisting of Dr. Max Riedel (Zeiss Innovation Hub @KIT), Moritz Luck (SilverScale Capital), Dr. Gernot Berger (High-Tech Gründerfonds) and Alin Semenescu (Sparkasse Karlsruhe), then asked questions and evaluated the pitches. In the end, the Catavis team had two reasons to be happy: The spin-off of KIT was ranked first in the jury's evaluation and also won the audience award.

Further information on the participating teams and the start-up pitch can be found here.

In the late afternoon, the second keynote of the day continued: Dr. Thomas Schneider, Managing Director of Development at TRUMPF Werkzeugmaschinen GmbH + Co. KG, dedicated his keynote to the topic of "Local thinking - global performance: How tomorrow's products emerge from cooperations". Here, he gave an introduction to innovative technologies that are products of local cooperations and used these examples to explain the added value that co-creation creates for the emergence of global innovations. "That's what we want to cover today: Exciting challenges and transformations that need long breath. Long breath and success, trust of the partners, in each other, in their competencies, to achieve excellence with it." Moderated by Katrin-Cécile Ziegler, the lecture led into a concluding discussion with Prof. Dr. Thomas Hirth from KIT.