News in Brief – Delta 26

“Because no matter how good we think we are at driving, we’re no match for technology when it comes to reaction time and alertness.” Van Arem used his speech to examine the future of mobility, including such technological innovations as cooperative vehicle-infrastructure systems, in which applications will allow mutual communication between vehicles, and between the vehicles and roadside systems. As cars become increasingly intelligent, it’s likely that in future they will drive themselves. “In the coming 10 to 15 years, Intelligent Transport Systems could contribute to 50% fewer traffic-jams, 25% fewer traffic fatalities, 10% less CO2 emission and 20% less air pollution.”

New bionanoscience
TU Delft officially opened its new department of bionanoscience on Thursday 16 September. This new department will focus on virtually unexplored scientific terrain: the interface between biology and
nanoscience. Bionanoscience is expected to become one of the key scientific areas of the 21st century, with enormous implications particularly for the field of medicine. Scientists anticipate new insights into how the living cell and DNA function as a result of this research. “Biology is set to become an engineering science”, said professor Cees Dekker, who, in addition to becoming the new director of the Kavli Institute, will also serve chairman of the bionanoscience department. “Today, nanotechnology’s tool box enables us to visualize, study and control biological molecules, such as DNA and proteins, highly accurately. This leads to new insights into the fundamental mechanisms of the living cell, knowledge which is indispensable in promising applications in, for example, medical treatments.”

Number eight
TU Delft president Dirk Jan van den Berg was ranked in 8th position in ScienceGuide’s annual ‘Top 10’ list of the most powerful and inspiring people in Dutch higher education, research, and innovation. In outlining the reasons for Van den Berg’s inclusion on this list, ScienceGuide wrote: ‘TU Delft chief Van den Berg travelled to Delft from the embassy in Beijing. He quickly readjusted to Europe. His plea for replacing the Finish model with the Swiss model at the Innovation Platform has invigorated the knowledge agenda’.

Merger
Speaking at the opening of the new academic year, Erasmus University Rotterdam’s president, Pauline van der Meer Mohr, expressed her desire to deepen the collaboration with TU Delft and Leiden University. Moreover, she would not rule out a future merger with those universities. TU Delft president Dirk Jan van den Berg stated that the three universities were already working together, but in future this partnership will become ‘much more dynamic’.

Turk’s pizza
TNT has sold the small post office building on the Mekelweg to a real estate company, which in turn has rented the building to a Turkish businessman who plans to open a Turkish snack bar with a terrace on the site. The TU’s executive board is agreeable to the move but has referred the issue to the legal department, as the site is located at the entrance of the campus.  

Help wanted
Freelance jobs available writing for Delta’s English Pages. We seek foreign students/staff to write articles in English, for payment, on a freelance basis. No experience necessary. We’re looking for enthusiastic, creative foreign students/staff to contribute articles, cartoons, illustrations and photographs. Interested, please send a brief introductory email to: d.mcmullin@tudelft.nl

So, you’re a young engineer with a brilliant idea, but no social network to speak of? Don’t worry, in the initial phase of a start-up company, networks aren’t essential to success. But you better start planning how to acquire a network to really launch once your technology is ready. That’s not a hunch. That’s science.

In a survey of hundred spin-off companies from universities in Delft and Trondheim (Norway), PhD student Danny Soetanto, who will defend his thesis on October 29, mapped the importance of social networks for the success – measured in terms of growth – of a company. “What I did is approach these companies with a set of questions,” he explains. “If you have a specific problem, who do you go to? How often do you see your contacts, where are they located, and for how long have you known them? This gave me a profile of the company’s social network, which I combined with the company’s characteristics.”

It appeared the companies fell into four categories. There is a clear distinction between Dutch and Norwegian start-ups, and between those which are older and younger than four years. “In Trondheim, funding is the biggest problem start-ups face,” Soetanto says. “This is because they feel they need venture capital and there is an obligation to form a board of directors from outside the company. Delft start-ups usually fund themselves, independence being an important motivation for the entrepreneurs. Here marketing is regarded as the biggest obstacle.”

All categories have something in common as well, though. The more heterogenous the social network surrounding a company, the more successful it is. However, if contacts with partners in universities and industry are too intimate, this usually has a negative impact on success. This, theory proposes, is because if you’re too much part of established networks, your mindset will be narrowed, thus holding back your creativity and impulses to innovate.
What, then, should start-ups do to acquire just the right network? There is no sure-fire solution, Soetanto says: “It depends very much on which type of company you are. In fact, even my presumption that growth is a measure of success is debatable. Some companies simply don’t want to grow. I also interviewed the entrepreneur of an ICT start-up that quickly grew to fourthy employees, only to have them forcibly laid off when economic prospects diminished.’

For the Delft situation, Soetanto, who is originally from Indonesia and will soon be leaving to take up a postdoc position at Lancaster University (UK), adds that his interviews were conducted several years ago. Since then, however, YES!Delft has really taken off as an incubator for university start-ups, while removing even more obstacles on the road to success by offering not only accomodation but also knowledge and networks. The Norwegian experience, it should be noted, shows that even if there are more obstacles to overcome in the first four years, in the long run viable companies do overcome them.
So, while it’s clear that having a not too tight, heterogeneous network around you is essential for a company’s ascent, there is no real recipe for becoming a succesfull network entrepreneur. Unsurprisingly, the group headed by Soetanto’s supervisor, prof.dr. Marina van Geenhuizen, at the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, has a large research programme focusing on university spin-offs. Among the questions is whether good networks breed succesfull companies or capable firms acquire effective networks. It may be a bit of both, but then, that’s more of a hunch than a scientific fact.