Ideon Science Park in Sydsvenskan on 26 October. Below is a translation of the article posted by Sydsvenskan, written by Albert Capuder.
Skåne’s innovation system is expected to accelerate with more space companies and other technology companies with an increased focus on space.
Many companies do not know that their products for civil society also work well in the space sector,” says Anders Nilsson, CEO of Ideon Innovation. Products with a space focus should ideally also be usable on Earth. A healthy business environment should include a variety of companies of different sizes to maintain innovation and momentum. One piece of the food chain is Ideon in Lund, which a few years ago became part of the national business incubator ESA BIC in Sweden.
The programme, which is an initiative of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Swedish National Space Board, aims to attract young companies with ideas and applications in space technology. However, the majority of applicant companies that are ultimately accepted by the ESA are not businesses with products that are only useful in space. It is more a matter of finding businesses that also have commercial viability on Earth.
Anders Nilsson is CEO of Ideon Science Park in Lund, which now develops business for start-up companies interested in the space market.
Nowadays we talk a lot about ‘dual use’, i.e. applications developed for civil society that can also be used in the defence industry or have a space connection. We have been poor at this, so we are now working on this with our start-ups,” says Anders Nilsson, CEO of Ideon Science Park in Lund.
Within ESA BIC, promising business ideas each receive a start-up grant of EUR 50,000, equivalent to just over half a million SEK. Half of the money comes from ESA and half from Vinnova. In addition, the young companies get access to office space at Ideon Innovation for one year and help with business development.
So far, one company, Vultus, has implemented the space programme in Lund. And another company, Green Emissions, now has a sole place in the incubator. At the same time, three more companies – Mantis Photonics, Almanac AI and Adamant Quanta – are in the middle of their respective application processes and are expected to receive a thumbs-up for formal programme participation in Lund.
One of these companies, Adamant Quanta, is building small and lightweight atomic clocks based on quantum technology, for use in satellite systems and in communication systems on earth. These are systems for sensing, timing, navigation and positioning using industrial diamonds that are processed and integrated into circuit boards.
Haitham El-Ella is the founder of Adamant Quanta, based in Lund, Sweden. The start-up company builds atomic clocks for use in satellite systems.
Right now we have two customers in Germany and Australia that we are working hard with. They manufacture components for navigation and measurement systems that are part of larger satellite systems,” says Haitham El-Ella, founder of Adamant Quanta.
The Lund-based company’s system also works well for vehicles in other extreme environments, such as mining vehicles, drones, submarines and for military use. Another application is all small low-flying communication satellites.
Space is an emerging market, and part of the development is to continuously find cheaper, more efficient and less bulky hardware technology to enable new advances in space, and we see great potential with our technology,” says Haitham El-Ella.
Space also creates opportunities to expand Ideon’s entire innovation activity, which currently includes more than 30 companies in various programmes. At present, however, the national space programme plays a rather modest role.
In the Nordic countries, we are a bit behind when it comes to space applications. Our universities have no major focus on it. Many companies today do not know that their products for civil society also work well in the space sector,” says Anders Nilsson.
ESA expects Sweden to have 30 space-related incubator companies across the country by 2027, and currently ten companies are included in ESA BIC Sweden. According to the current contract, there are thus not very many companies left to take in.
But in a longer perspective, Lund is considered to have a trump card in the competition with both other Swedish innovation hubs and in a global context, which is believed to accelerate Skåne’s importance for the Swedish and European space industry.
A very interesting factor is that we now have a couple of extremely heavy materials research centres in Lund with ESS and Max IV. And materials research is important in areas that deal with durability in inhospitable environments such as space,” says Anders Nilsson.
He believes that this will attract more companies to the ESA BIC in Lund – especially companies that are involved in space applications, but are not necessarily involved in a pure space programme.
Because in the longer term, the perception of what characterises a space company may become blurred.
With the commercialisation of the space domain, the whole innovation system will spin faster with more integrating technologies. For example, we see tremendous opportunities at the intersection of artificial intelligence and increasingly smart monitoring and control of activities on Earth using satellite data,” says Nilsson.
Read the article in Swedish on Sydsvenskan
Photo cred: Aldebaran-s-qt – Unsplash
FACTS
ESA BIC
– Stands for European Space Agency Business Incubation Centre.
– The initiative with European space incubators in Sweden was launched in 2015 on the initiative of the Swedish National Space Agency, Vinnova and ESA
– It is the first organisation in the Nordic region for start-up companies that use space technology solutions for technical problems on Earth – or vice versa.
– There are a total of 60 incubators in the EU-wide network.
– In Sweden, there are four such space incubators: in Uppsala, Trollhättan, Luleå and Lund.
