The CEO Blog

EIT RawMaterials and EIT Health transferred business skills to innovative entrepreneurs through an initiative that had a special focus on Central and Eastern Europe and was marked with a 10 November award ceremony in Budapest, Hungary, to honour the winners of a Business Plan Competition 2017. "To boost Europe’s ability to innovate, we will continue to support Europe’s talented entrepreneurs, helping them to turn their best ideas into products, services and jobs for Europe," said Katerina Sereti, Stakeholder Relations Officer at the EIT. The competition focused on participants coming predominantly, but by no means exclusively, from countries included in the [...]

EIT RawMaterials will organise a workshop 'How methodology determines what is critical' during the international conference Resources for Future Generations (RFG), in Vancouver, Canada, 16-21 June 2018. The call for abstracts is open - we will be happy to receive your contribution. Please submit your abstract until 15 January 2018 here. About MIN35: How methodology determines what is critical Access to raw materials has always been fundamental to the development of human culture. Advanced materials have often played a key role as enablers of innovation. In recent years, awareness about vulnerable global supply chains of specific materials or semi-finished products has [...]

The Central Colocation Center (Metz, France) of EIT RawMaterials organised a workshop on competitiveness in the Lithium Industry, 11-12 October 2017 in Würzburg, Germany, together with Core Partner Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research ISC. The event attracted roughly 100 participants from across the value chain; one half of them were non-EIT RawMaterials members. The panel of experts gave an opportunity to review the European potentials in Lithium in terms of mining, extraction and refinement, battery materials, and cell manufacturing. In more detail, the events of the two days went as follows: 11 October: On the first day, the workshop was opened by [...]

Participants practice collecting and analysing geometallurgical data Outotec is a core partner of EIT RawMaterials, the largest consortium of the raw materials sector worldwide. As part of Outotec's participation in the consortium, we co-hosted a one-week geometallurgy short course at the University of Liege in Belgium in the beginning of October 2017. The course was joined by some 30 geologists and mining and beneficiation experts. The one-week short course was second in a geometallurgy course series. Participants got practice on how to collect and analyse geometallurgical data. Outotec's presentations focused on how this data is utilised in process calculations and [...]

Laser guidance helps miners ‘see’ through rock The winner of the first Rockathon, organised by EIT RawMaterials and its partner Sandvik, was the team from SPECTRAL Industries. SPECTRAL Industries develops a system that uses laser guidance to help mining engineers “see” into rock and make precision cuts. Rockathon, a co-creation and open innovation event, took place on 5 September 2017 in Tampere, Finland. During Rockathon, technology and software development companies, as well as subject-matter experts, collaborated intensively on an onboard analysis project. Rockathon participants were asked to contribute via brainstorming, ideation exercises and co-creation design thinking to a real-time system for [...]

EIT a model for European innovation: Commission Report The European Commission proclaimed the European Institute for Innovation and Technology (EIT) to be an effective, coherent and high-impact means of supporting innovation in a Mid-term Evaluation Report of the EIT published on 19 October. “The EIT has successfully supported innovation in Europe via entrepreneurship, support to hundreds of start-ups, providing access to cross-border networks and to seed and growth funding. The first-wave KICs´ activities are leading towards visible results,” according to an Executive Summary of the report. The Report highlights that: EIT is the only EU body that fully integrates business, research [...]