The Transformation of Climate-KIC Innovation Projects Into Startups – N. Kerstens
Transforming Climate-KIC innovation projects into startups is a challenging solution for the problems that innovation projects currently face in reaching the goal of commercializing new products and services. This research identifies these problems by conducting interviews with innovation project managers, entrepreneurs from startups and business developers within the KIC environment. Based on this information, opportunities for the Climate-KIC regulation to facilitate the transformation are discovered and consist of an improvement of partnership regulation, intellectual property right administration, grant funding guidelines and lifetime regulation of the innovation project. The occurring problems cannot only be averted by improving the Climate-KIC regulation, but also by using the KICs FIT ME business model template designed in this research. This model is able to avert the problems that currently occur, even before the innovation project starts. It handles the commitment of partners, key value of the innovation, intellectual property regulation and stresses the need of an entrepreneur in innovation projects to reach the commercialization goal.