Excellence Start-Up Center NRW granted at WWU Münster

Yesterday, WWU Rector Prof. Johannes Wessels successfully defended our proposal for an Excellence Start-Up Center NRW at our university in front of a high ranking jury in Düsseldorf! Together with five other Universities in NRW - namely Aachen, Bochum, Dortmund, Köln, and Paderborn - WWU will receive a total of 150 Mio Euro over the next five years to support the development of a start-up friendly “ecosystem” in Münster. The money is not supposed to directly be invested in start-ups. Rather, the existing support and service units of the university will be expanded, and new ones will be developed, to create an environment that is more open to innovation and that offers better conditions for the transfer of promising ideas from university to industry and society by the creation of spin-off companies. The proposal was and the project will be coordinated by Prof. Thorsten Wiesel from the Marketing Center Münster of the School of Business and Economics at WWU, supported i.a. by Prof. Bruno Moerschbacher and Prof. Dirk Prüfer from our institute, but the future founders are expected to come mainly from the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences. While the detailed actions to be implemented by ESC@WWU are to be developed over the coming years, their focus will, thus, be on supporting founders like Hans Kleine-Brüggeney, Robert Weingarten and Dr. Sebastian Bühren who founded Evorion Biotechnologies in 2017, “our” first start-up, or Dr. Rebecca Melcher and Dr. Tobias Weikert who founded “our” second start-up, Bex-Biotech, last year. This is good news for the future, as we have more plans for commercialization of our research results, and founding start-ups is the most exciting option!