To help you learn more about Climate-KIC and what it offers, we spoke with Malte Schneider. This month will sees Malte migrate from his role as Deputy Director of Innovation to oversee the German centre as its new Director.

With over three years’ experience as Climate-KIC’s Deputy Director of Innovation, he is perfectly placed to guide you through what our Innovation and Pathfinders programme can offer our Masters and PhD students.

To start with, it would be interesting to understand how the two project types – Innovation and Pathfinder – differ?

Pathfinder projects aim at exploring future demands. We assess the potential for innovations to meet those demands and identify barriers to their deployment. In short, the aim is to find the right path forward before Climate-KIC and/or the partners invest into it.

Innovation differs in that its projects develop and bring to market specific climate-relevant knowledge, products and services to meet a clearly identified demand. These projects last longer, consume more resources and typically involve smaller groups. Partners manage who will eventually commercialise certain outputs.

When a business idea has gone beyond the café and into a structured plan, what is important for you when deciding what kind of projects you will support?

For us two things are paramount: a clear climate impact and the potential to deliver concrete self-sustaining economic activity, eventually leading to jobs. More specifically, projects need to be innovative than state-of-the-art, identify and address a clear market demand and show that they have the right partners on board to develop and exploit the innovation in the market place. I’m always looking for projects which show how their project integrates with our Education and Entrepreneurship activities.

How do you determine between proposals which are truly innovative and those which are harnessing existing cutting edge technologies and why does it matter?

Of course we would never fund projects that just roll out known solutions in standard ways. However, a project doesn’t necessarily have to propose the development of a novel and innovative technology, sometimes it already exists but there are barriers which prevent their diffusion. We also fund projects that develop truly innovative business models and services which mainstream available climate-friendly solutions. What we strive for is a good balance between these different types of innovations, often depending on the thematic area.

What opportunities are available for our students within the Innovation-Pathfinders projects?

There are several, let me highlight just two. First, and actually my favourite, Pathfinder projects could be a great vehicle for groups of Master’s students across Europe to help a more experienced project team to assess market opportunities and innovation potentials, ideally in their Master theses. I can’t emphasise this enough and it’s a message which needs to be shared within our partner community.

 Secondly, students can also support Innovation projects with regard to very specific sub-topics: why not do a Masters assignment on validating the customer demand using a prototype developed by a project and incorporate required design changes with the project team?

How do you help students demonstrate to potentially interested parties and the general public that their concept is ready and workable?

In principle, students have easy access via their co-location centre to leading experts form the academic and private partners that could provide them feedback. This could then enable them to feed in their ideas to the platform work on a European level and participate in dedicated workshops, if they have a good idea. But this is an area that we – the Climate-KIC Innovation and Education pillars – still need to work on more. When the Community Hub is ready for Education in March, it will help tackle this issue. They will be able to upload ideas on the Hub and make the relevant platform facilitators aware of it, helping it gain more prominence.

How can Climate-KIC students create movement towards more open innovation initiatives in Europe in a risk-adverse economic environment?

One idea that could be very helpful in this regard is to develop formats where Climate-KIC and its students “offer a service” to individual or groups of our larger partners to work on their systemic climate related challenges. These new “out-of-the-box” ideas could be taken up by the companies themselves but ideally with the students. In any case the students would have gained valuable insights into the challenges that certain organisations are facing which is really valuable for when they graduate. Our Alumni organisation could play an important role here.

Can PhDs students use and incorporate their initial proposals for their PhDs to Innovations?

PhD students can of course do projects closely aligned with our thematic (platform) priorities and projects. This ensures access to a European community of experts and real-world challenges. As our Innovation projects though really need to deliver innovation valued by the market and thus might shift course at certain stages, you would need to be ready to do undertake a more flexible PhD or make sure your project is fundamental to innovation in this area in any case!

As we have seen our entrepreneurial summer school, The Journey, sometimes people come up with similar ideas. What do you look for in a proposal when different groups unintentionally offer near-identical products and services?

This is a sign that the community jointly agrees on the importance of certain challenges and innovation potentials, therefore a clear potential for pooling resources and exploiting synergies can exist.

Obviously, if the overlap is too much we would not fund a second initiative. But if sufficient complementarity exists we would initiate a dialogue between the two teams to see whether we can create a good package. This is one of the elements that clearly distinguishes us from standard funding agencies because we look to initiate dialogue to bring inspirit innovation.

If you are Climate-KIC student and are interested in speaking to someone about this programme, contact your local regional centre: climate-kic.org/for-students/contact-us/  and visit our Innovation and Pathfinders website: climate-kic.org/projects/

If you are interested in finding out more about our pan-European Masters and PhD labelled programmes, visit our website: climate-kic.org