About HeSIE

Stimulate transfer “bottom up” and enable it “top down” – that is the idea behind HeSIE. This includes the establishment and expansion of a structured transfer pipeline covering all stages from awareness to market entry and transfer into application.

We want to embed transfer, innovation and entrepreneurship in the professional training and career development activities at all Helmholtz Centers. Every doctoral student, postdoc and manager should have access to sensitization webinars and training workshops, covering a broad range of topics concerning entrepreneurship and innovation.

We want to demystify terms like "Innovation", “Value Proposition Canvas” and “USP” and show you pathways as well as methods that can lead and support you throughout all steps of your innovation journey.
It is Helmholtz’s proclaimed goal to conduct research and find solutions for the grand challenges of our time. In order to master a grand challenge, we as society not only need to discover new ways of thinking but also new ways of doing. In other words, we need to put innovative research into practice.

While new ways of thinking are the bread and butter of scientists, new ways of doing and especially helping others to do things differently is often a challenge on its own. Despite our various funding programs and the efforts of our great transfer teams, researchers at Helmholtz need more comprehensive guidance and incentive to put their research in to practice. HeSIE aims to bridge that gap and help you master today’s grand challenges.

Topics of Entrepreneurship and Innovation

We offer a comprehensive program to foster entrepreneurial skills and facilitate the transfer of research into practical applications. HeSIEs offerings include workshops on market exploration, legal challenges in startups, and financial intelligence, as well as intensive programs to guide participants from need identification to solution development.

Entrepreneurial thinking in the context of Helmholtz is a perspective you can take to look at your scientific work, one that focuses on the pursuit of a problem-solution-fit. It includes identifying an existing problem of a group of people, taking time to understand their needs for a solution and leveraging your scientific work to help solve the problem. This group of people can be a company but it can also be – and often is – the general public, a government body or other scientists. With our introductory level modules on entrepreneurial thinking, we want to demystify buzzwords like innovation, USP or Value Proposition, do away with the prejudice of greed-driven commercialization and help scientists discover the potential of applying their research.

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Support from the right people at the right time is crucial in advancing your problem-solution. Knowing other innovation enthusiasts or the guy who works for the company, which produces the device you so urgently need, can come in handy when you are facing an obstacle that prevents you from getting your solution to a stage in which people can actually use it. While these people cannot flick their magic wands and make the obstacle go away, knowing them can often give you the right idea, speed up a process or bear the opportunity for collaboration to overcome your obstacle more quickly.

With our networking opportunities, we want to introduce you to other (future) sciencepreneurs at Helmholtz and beyond, and to potential partners from industry and the general public. In addition, with our investor events, we aim to connect you and your innovative idea to the people with the means to fund making it a reality.

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Most failed young businesses conceded that the reason for their lacking success was that nobody needed their product. Understanding who is and who is not a potential user of your solution is essential from an early stage. Nothing is more frustrating that binding endless time, money and resources in developing something nobody is asking for. Or something that people need but not do like to use because it lacks features which are critical to them.

Our introductory level modules on market analysis show you how crucial it is to understand early on what future users of your innovative invention actually need and will provide you with handy methods to obtain this valuable information.

Related: Field Study Fellowship Funding (Helmholtz Enterprise) →

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Bringing an innovative idea into application all on your own is rarely a good idea. What is more, not only do you need to find the right people to advance your innovative idea, you also need to find ways to work together well as a team and develop the necessary skills for all the different tasks that come with founding a company.

In our modules on team formation and building directed at future sciencepreneurs or young Helmholtz startups, we want to show you ways to build up a great team, familiarize you with strategies to work together more efficiently and make you aware of certain pitfalls along the way.

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There is a huge gap between a scientific discovery and a user-ready problem-solution. Sometimes, it only takes months to close it, more often it takes years. While most of you presumably did not have their eureka moment just last week, there exist handy methods for the entire development process.

Our modules on product development cover established tools such as the Value Proposition Canvas and the Lean Startup method, which help you focus on what is important to advance your project and leave aside what is not.

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Your business model ties together your problem-solution with finances, production, customers and partners. It helps you find the delicate balance to establish and sustain your problem-solution on the market and enables you to grasp the interaction of these complex aspects of your enterprise. Fortunately, there exist established concepts and methods, which can help you orient yourself in the often intangible world of customer segments and cost structures.

Our modules on business model development will introduce you to these tools so that you understand their potential but also their limitations. With their help you can make some key assumptions which you can later revise and revise again as you progress on your entrepreneurial journey.

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Using or transferring IP outside the context of your center is a delicate subject. The center committed a substantial amount of public money and resources to support you in the creation of the IP and has institutional responsibility to protect it. At the same time, you have an interested in the IP to advance your project effectively and want to be attractive to benefactors and investors.

In our modules on IP management, we present regulations and best practices concerning licensing agreements, transfer of IP and royalty payments to facilitate negotiations with your center.

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Financial resources - both from public and private sources - enable you to build prototypes, create the freedom to focus on applying your science and meet potential users of your problem-solution. You as scientists are no strangers to winning over juries and pitching complex ideas to decision makers. However, benefactors, venture capitalists and other investors in business think differently than a board made up of scientists and public servants.

Our modules on financing shed light on institutional funding opportunities for transfer-related projects, both at national and EU-level and introduce you to how investors think, what they need and how you can best prepare to convince them of your idea. In our biannual event 4Investors, hosted jointly by Fraunhofer Society, Leibniz Association, Max Planck Society and Helmholtz, we even bring together selected Helmholtz projects and a broad range of investors.

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Making your solution accessible to the people who need it often requires creating a legal framework to facilitate the process. This involves picking the right legal form for a company, hiring people, protecting IP and other steps that require careful legal consideration. Before starting negotiations with your center or committing a considerable sum of money to hire a lawyer, it is helpful to gain a basic understanding of the legal challenges you will be facing on your entrepreneurial journey.

In our modules on legal advice, we partner up with legal experts and law firms to give you a compact overview of the legal procedures necessary to found a company, foundation, etc. In addition, we periodically offer 1:1 sessions with legal experts for you to ask case-specific questions and clear your path in the jungle of paragraphs and laws.

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