Eindhoven Engine News – February edition 2022

For Eindhoven Engine, 2022 has been kickstarted with the new name for our co-location: Disruptor. Disruptor fits Eindhoven Engine and the other tenants perfectly as we’re all working on innovations that will make a difference to industry and society!

In April, we will broaden our portfolio by adding new projects from the OpenCall 2022. Together with the new and ongoing projects, we will have more impact and cross-over innovations. Other interesting news to share with you includes:

• The insights of almost-retired Fontys Liaison Manager Kees Adriaanse. He looks back on a variety of achievements at Eindhoven Engine, as well as the wicked challenges he’d like to see solved.
• Developments in Eindhoven Engine projects: the NEON EE project addressing societal challenges and the next phase in the Smart Mobility project.
• The first pilot of the Business Model Innovation in an Exponential World course for the NEON EE project.
• Our societal impact by committing to reusable isolation gowns and durable mouth-nose facemasks in the Netherlands.
• Building the community from the viewpoint of PDEng trainee Anand Thamban.

“I’ve played an active role in Eindhoven Engine by making the right connections between my Fontys colleagues and the members of the Eindhoven Engine community. I inform my colleagues of interesting subjects so that they can connect or write a proposal for a call. You could call me an ‘in-between’.”

After many years at Fontys University of Applied Science and three years as their liaison manager in Eindhoven Engine, Kees Adriaanse is stepping away from both organizations. How has the Engine changed during this time and what are his hopes for his successor? Kees looks back on a variety of achievements, as well as the wicked challenges he’d like to see solved.

Back to the start

As one of the three Eindhoven Engine stakeholders (alongside TNO and Eindhoven University of Technology), the main benefit for Fontys is increased collaboration with partners in both industry and academia – something which Kees has also shaped by bringing together research groups and students in relevant projects. He also emphasizes the unique nature of collaboration within the Engine as a major advantage: “The most important aspect is co-creation. It’s very important that people from different projects can meet each other at the coffee corners to inspire each other. In the near future, I hope that the coffee corner will be the boardroom of Eindhoven Engine!”

“The most important aspect is co-creation. It’s very important that people from different projects can meet each other at the coffee corners to inspire each other.”

Kees Adriaanse
Fontys Liaison Manager

Regarding changes over the last few years, Kees also notes that Eindhoven Engine was initially an organization with low TRL projects and few students. “I’m proud that we’re getting more students in most of the projects,” he says, pointing to SmartMan as an example of the intersection between academia and SMEs. “Compared to my dreams at the beginning of Eindhoven Engine, we went much further than I thought was possible and have achieved a lot in these last three years.”

Reaching all parts of society

As for the future, Eindhoven Engine’s focus in increasingly turning to societal problems and the use of technology in areas such as health, energy and agri-food. “I think it will be important to get even more new research areas,” Kees suggests. “For example, there are many people who learned to read and write at school but no longer really know how to do either. How can we help these people? That’s a dream for me: that Eindhoven Engine projects can help low-literate people or people without good mobility, for instance.” Such societal challenges need to be tackled and give Eindhoven Engine the opportunity to showcase how we co-create and come to meaningful innovation. One example of such a project in the Brainport region is Eindhoven Engine’s work with Eindhoven Library on a technical solution to improve the connection between low-literates and society.

Despite reaching retirement age, this isn’t quite the end of Kees’ career. “For three days a week, I’ll go back to where I started as a physics teacher many years ago. That’s because physics is a nice discipline and I want to spend the last years of my working experience in a secondary school,” he concludes. “I want to say one more thing to my successor: make project teams not only with people from universities and polytechnicals but also with more surprising groups of people, like schoolchildren, people of 70 or 80 years old or actors and painters. Of course, it’s important to have people with high qualifications on technical subjects. But people from other parts of society can give you another view. Inclusivity means making sure that not only highly educated people benefit from the Brainport region but also the people living here, and we can help with that.”

NEON develops integral agent-based models (AKA digital twins) of the energy and mobility transition. These models can take knowledge from many disciplines and use this to design realistic and cost-effective pathways towards a low-carbon future.

Making the leap

Through this Eindhoven Engine project called NEON EE, these models will make the leap from technology readiness level 4 to 7 and from societal readiness level 3 to 6. Policy makers, businesses, and other societal stakeholders will find that it’s possible to quickly apply the open-source NEON tooling to their own region and business case. NEON EE will also organize a series of workshops and serious games at the Eindhoven Engine with policy makers and business leaders. NEON EE adds interaction design specialists and student teams from Fontys to the NEON consortium.

The tooling will become even more interactive and engaging with a format to apply it in multi-stakeholder workshops that increase system thinking and mutual understanding. In this way NEON EE will accelerate the transition to a sustainable future for the Brainport region and beyond.

OpenCall 2021 project

On 29 June 2021, the NEON EE project joined Eindhoven Engine as one of the four OpenCall 2021 projects. Soon, NEON EE had moved into the co-location (Disruptor building) of Eindhoven Engine and started to accelerate its research together with the other Engine projects while playing an active role in the Eindhoven Engine Community.

If you would like to stay informed on NEON, you can subscribe to their newsletter by sending an email to Mixel Kiemen (m.kiemen@tue.nl). You can also contact Mixel with any questions.

Hans, PhD candidate in the POWEr FITTing project, researches the improvement of a healthier and active environment for people in (home) offices. By the combination of data acquisition, integration and application for the validation and acceleration of user-oriented solutions, Hans is optimizing the relationship between vitality and the (home) office environment. Check out the video how Hans does these measurements with Sensorbadge and StimuLight!

Contact: Marieke van Beurden @ m.v.beurden@tue.nl

Also, a few new students started in the office team to help us with increasing organized serendipity. And it’s not just about looking at how to create serendipity: we also have reinforcements – again in the form of students – in the Emergence Lab projects ‘Low Literacy’ and ‘Future of Work’ so that we can actually experience this serendipity!

As for now, the upcoming period looks promising from a COVID perspective and we hope to see you soon at one of the upcoming events in DISRUPTOR to further DISRUPT!

PDEng trainee Anand Thamban

Alongside students at Eindhoven Engine, we have a group of PhD candidates and PDEng trainees working on one of the Eindhoven Engine projects. One of them is Anand Thamban.

Hi, my name is Anand and I’m a PDEng trainee in the Smart Buildings and Cities program. My PDEng project is about the development of a fault detection and diagnosis tool for cooling systems in buildings and I am working with Kropman Installatietechniek. My project is funded and supported by Eindhoven Engine under the main project ‘CM-HVAC-FDD’. By being part of Eindhoven Engine, I get to interact with researchers and students from various other projects where there is active knowledge sharing and learning, especially in the field of energy efficiency and human comfort. The networking with other project members and start-ups helps in expanding my professional outreach, which I find to be a very valuable advantage while working within Eindhoven Engine. It would be really nice to interact with more people from other projects so that we can share our experiences with each other, get some ideas and gain some knowledge.

The course is available for free use by all but, given the innovative nature of the approach and the specific focus, it will clearly be easier and will yield more impact if it is mentored/coached. This mentoring process can be organized virtually or face to face and the Academy can provide this support on a fee basis. At the same time, Eindhoven Engine wants to offer this opportunity to its own projects on a voluntary basis. For the Engine projects, this offer includes a few personal coaching sessions with the team leader in order to make sure that whatever comes up in the seminars is anchored in the project management. The first brave participants were part of the NEON project.

The purpose, structure and approach of the course are on our website, but we want to share some feedback from participants on how they experienced the series.

“I enjoyed the Eindhoven Engine seminar as it provided a structure to reassess our project through a different lens, which is not the immediate lens of our own research. In that regard, it allowed me to see other aspects of my research that I had not directly thought of. It also highlighted the practical applicability of our project and how we can translate our research into an increased contribution to society. I highly recommend it for multidisciplinary projects as it allows one to align different viewpoints and to subsequently create added value for the entire project.“

Researcher NEON

“In a sense, the seminar series shows us how to ‘extend the cake’ by aligning our research rather than how we ‘share a cake’ through the lens of our individual research.“

Researcher NEON

*_{PATO: stichting Post-Academisch Technisch Onderwijs}

Contact: Marieke van Beurden @ m.v.beurden@tue.nl

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