Germany’s innovation agency gives money rapidly to multiple competing teams to find radical new technologies. The EIC is creating similar contests
Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation (Sprind) team. Photo credits: Sprind
In a room full of metal recycling entrepreneurs eagerly taking notes, Patrick Rose, a manager at Germany’s Sprind innovation agency, holds up and rattles a jar full of shredded smartphone motherboards.
Rose is explaining Sprind’s latest challenge, in which teams get €1.5 million and one year to take this jar of junk and find new ways to extract some of the dozens of valuable elements inside that currently go to waste. The teams fight to progress through two new rounds of funding and, in theory, end up with a market-ready company within three years.
“Impress us, blow our minds,” Rose said at a briefing day in Berlin on September 10. “Ideally, I would like to destroy the recycling industry.”
Challenges, where teams compete to reach a technological goal, are not a new idea in innovation funding. Most famously, they are a favourite tool of the US Defense…
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