fiftyONE is a part of the Innovation Excellence activities at Heraeus, which include supporting internal start-ups via a tech incubator. Agile ways of working also inspire our established businesses. Heraeus start-ups also benefit from the experience of our business areas. Methods, processes, fresh ideas and best practices can be shared accordingly. The same applies for exchanges with external partners. Heraeus aims to open up innovation processes with the goal of establishing strategic partnerships that increase the potential for innovation and broaden the fiftyONE community network.
Heraeus’s cooperation with TU Darmstadt is one example successful collaboration, especially during Start-up Week. For one week, Heraeus employees work at different start-ups in the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center at the TU Darmstadt that focus on high tech and digitalization.
“We want to support innovations and entrepreneurs with HIGHEST, our Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center,” says Professor Peter Buxmann, director of the Center. “We focus on high tech and digitalization. I am very pleased that we have enlisted Heraeus as a strategic partner, as the company is an example of innovation. With events like Start-up Week, we want to drive innovations forward in the future and support start-ups.”
Both sides benefit from the exchange. Heraeus specialists and managers at international sites can pass on their expertise on marketing or sales issues, for example, while learning about new ways to work from the start-ups.
“For successful innovation, cooperation between companies, institutions and universities is more important than ever,” says Dr. André Kobelt, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Commercial Officer at Heraeus. “This collaboration with the young entrepreneurs at the TU Darmstadt helps us by introducing new ways of thinking into our company and integrating them for the long term.”
The TU Darmstadt is part of a network of external partners that collaborate with Heraeus to increase the company’s innovation potential because innovations profit from networked knowledge and ideas from different directions.