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The Kitchen forges new ties between established companies and the university’s startup community.
Not many people today are talking about crab legs or pork loin with sour pork when they hurry down the corridor with the easy-to-clean white kitchen tiles on the wall. The 3300 square metres that used to be the municipal hospital’s commercial kitchen has been converted into The Kitchen, which, like its Zealand ‘sister’ Skylab at DTU, is a community for entrepreneurship. Here, students, researchers, companies and investors are invited inside the doors with the common goal of developing and supporting startups and innovation.
Today, around 130 companies are affiliated with The Kitchen and here they have access to workshops, courses, start-up help for investments, validation of business models and much more. Many of the offers are wrapped up in an incubator programme and, if you’re very ambitious, in an acceleration programme where the process and approach to investors is more rocket science. Among them is the startup Textile Change, which won the Otto Mønsted Foundation’s “The Bright Idea 2021” award and received DKK 250,000 for the team’s solution for recycling mixed textiles.
Innovation Club is a new offer
Jeppe Dørup Olesen is Acting Head of Innovation at Aarhus University and head of The Kitchen. Together with his closest colleagues, he is working to realise a membership-based Innovation Club, which the Otto Mønsted Foundation has given a grant to establish. The Innovation Club was born out of a specific desire from the business community to get close to the startup environment to gain access to new ideas and collaborations. In return, established companies and organisations can contribute knowledge about product development and the process of building a business.
“We now have a handful of companies that have committed to becoming members and more will join as we approach a full programme in 2022. They are all interested in coming in and working with the companies in The Kitchen, meeting the talented young people, hearing about what they are working on and becoming part of an environment where people get fun ideas. And conversely, we tell members that we basically expect a pay-it-forward attitude to the collaboration. They should give some of their time and resources without expecting a quick payback,” says Jeppe Dørup Olesen.
Jeppe Dørup Olesen brought this ‘give before you receive’ attitude with him from California, where he worked for four years as a research and innovation attaché at Innovation Centre Denmark in Silicon Valley.
What do you see as the main difference between the startup environment in Silicon Valley and Aarhus?
“The Silicon Valley ecosystem is largely made up of very talented people from some super selective universities where only 2% of applicants make it through the eye of the needle. It’s that talent pool combined with the presence of a lot of risk-takers with a lot of money.
And then there’s just a different mentality. There’s “something in the water” as we used to say. There is a special interest in starting a business yourself. It’s considered much more hip to start your own business than to work at Facebook, and there are a lot of people in academia who are starting businesses. And then there are the many stories of success and the dream of becoming the next unicorn,” says Jeppe Dørup Olesen.
Moreover, entrepreneurship is a practical discipline at American universities, says Jeppe Dørup Olesen.
“This has also inspired us here at the university to make it possible for students to do an internship in their own company, recognising that you can learn a lot from this.”
The Head of Innovation is confident about the future in Denmark. There is more available capital than before and more focus on entrepreneurship as an interesting way to go, so there are more and more entrepreneurs.
“We have 130 startups in The Kitchen and many more if we look across the whole of Aarhus University. It’s becoming more and more popular. The environment here gives some people a stronger belief that what they are doing is exciting and has potential. We also have to teach them that it’s impossible to create something successful or get an investment if you only have time on Saturday afternoon.”
In August, two entrepreneurship educators, Ken Singer and David Law from the University California, Berkeley,visited Denmark to hold two masterclasses for teachers at Danish educational institutions. Read more here