Mönchengladbach. Leon Blanckart, founder and academic staff member at The Hochschule Niederrhein, took second place overall in the "From Lab to Market Challenge" (FLTMC) at the Henkel Inspiration Center in Düsseldorf. The graduate of the Faculty of Textile and Clothing Technology also won the public vote.
With his innovative idea to produce sustainable textiles from algae and a convincing pitch in the final, Blanckart secured a grant of 1,500 euros. His start-up AlgaCore is based on the AlgaTex research project currently being funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The challenge was organized by chemstars.nrw and the cooperation platform Ausgründungspotenziale Nachhaltige Chemie (KOALA).
"It is much more difficult to pitch a business idea in five minutes than to give a 20-minute project presentation. That's exactly what I learned and perfected through the challenge, so that I can now position myself even better with my start-up project AlgaCore," says Blanckart and adds: "There are so many innovative ideas at our university. I can only advise everyone to take the plunge and take part in such competitions."
The FLTMC is a low-threshold ideas competition for product and business ideas from the fields of chemistry, industrial biotechnology, materials science or digital technology with links to chemistry. The competition is aimed at scientists who want to start thinking about the commercialization of their research.
Chemstars.nrw is an open platform initiated by companies in the chemical industry and the North Rhine-Westphalia Chemical Industry Association (NRW). The aim is to motivate more chemists from research to embark on a career as an entrepreneur.
KOALA was founded by RWTH Aachen University and the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion and aims to minimize the barriers in the pre-start-up phase in the field of sustainable chemistry through interdisciplinary networking. This makes an important contribution to the successful founding of start-ups and the transfer of innovations into application.
