On Monday, June 29, the first group of four entrepreneurs presented their businessplans to a business panel. Rob Wermenbol of Amitek Model Factory kicked off with his businessplan for 3-d printed models, usable for any kind of market and application. Showing a variety of models, Rob illustrated how his company might radically change the concept of design and production, in terms of flexibiltity, investments and time-to-market. Next came Paul Jenkins and Elisa Gielen, who presented “seeEzi”, their video-based platform for knowledge exchange, facilitating contacts between laymen and experts, in healthcare and business consulting to begin with. Frans Paalman of Frawi, introduced his budding business idea with a BMW-video on the garage mechanic of the future. However, Frans aims at facilitating private persons to do car maintenance. Finally the floor was for Dennis Doubovski with a sophisticated presentation of Bestelplatform, a solution for the problem of incompatible ordering systems, that many customers and suppliers have.

The panel scored the entrepreneurs on their management teams, their individual qualities, their business models and their products. But of course, the entrepreneurs also got lots of good advice from Sascha Mengerink, Roel Pieper, Geerhard Huising and Vincent Heutinck, and -especially for Frans- Wouter Koenderink.

Flying the Atlantic in a single-engined plane on biofuel. It may sound like a mission impossible, yet Air Center Europe (ACE) will prove it isn’t.

In cooperation with VentureLab Twente, Ingrepro – a biotech company, and Dutch institutes for higher education, ACE is working on the development of biofuel for aviation. “This is an example of sustainable entrepreneurship. It is ACE’s mission to develop renewable energy for aviation” says ACE-director Ben Cappelle.

Early in the morning of March 15, ACE’s Antonov 2, todays’ largest operational double decker plane, took off for a short flight from Teuge to Eelde (Groningen). Passengers were VentureLab’s programme-manager Rob van Lambalgen and Ingrepro-director Carel Callenbach, who the night before had been the proud winner of the award for best European project in a contest of the province of Gelderland (NL). VentureLab’s predecessor, the “Kansrijk Eigen Baas” programme, was nominated too and came shared second/third.

In the beginning of August, the Antonov will have its first trans-Atlantic flight on biofuel, from California (USA) to the Netherlands. The algal kerosene will be tested at Twente airport. The European Space Agency will have satellite observation of the flight. A webcam on board will enable live flight participation via the Internet.

Source: Groninger Internet Courant