The national startup ecosystem has reached a new level of maturity over the last 10 years and is striving to the next level. The role and mission of Technoport, with 25 years of expertise in this sector, is to ensure that it keeps its proactivity in shaping and structuring this ecosystem for the coming decade.
Can you present your company in a few words?
Technoport is a generic technology business incubator operating since 1998. Our mission is to support startup companies, spin-off projects from public research institutions as well as research and development laboratories from foreign companies to establish and develop innovations out of Luxembourg. We do this by offering coaching and advising support, access to our different networks (national and international) as well as by granting access to the adequate business facilities (office space as well as industrial facilities). Among some of the companies we had the honor to host within our premisses over the years we can list Luxscan Technologies, Talkwalker, Tadaweb, Passbolt, RCDevs, Open Assessment Technologies, Neopixl, Jamendo, ITTM or ANote Music. These are just a short list of the more than 100 companies that left our incubator since our inception.
“We constantly try to improve them and identify new trends for our community.”
How are your customers’ needs evolving?
A very important number to know in our activity is that roughly 50% of our yearly applications are coming from abroad. In 2022 we had applications from over 19 countries coming from different continents. These entrepreneurs, when deciding to establish operations in Europe and more specifically in Luxembourg, look at many more variables than back in the early years of our operations. They also consult us on aspects as housing, commute, schools, cost of living and general activities. For the rest we notice that the needs are roughly consistent with the usual challenges that a tech and innovative company faces namely : de-risking as much as possible the project, get in touch with the right experts and prospects, discover new market opportunities, getting access to the right financing schemes and sources and last but not least find the right talents to grow and scale their business over time.
How do you see your company evolving in the next 5 years?
Since 2012 we tend to say that we are considering ourselves more than a simple incubator. We test new concepts for our ecosystem like we did by developing the digital fabrication laboratory (Fablab) back in 2013, or by introducing concepts like hackathons or cross-border living labs to Luxembourg. We constantly try to improve them and identify new trends for our community. The coming 5 years will be focused on leveraging several opportunities. We will develop and strengthen some verticals (Space, automotive/mobility, digital health) by ensuring that we keep the strengths of staying generic and foster cross-industry relationships. We will expand to new operational sites which will mean stepping up in terms of team size and expertise. Finally we will be exploiting much more our own data and market intelligence to bring our activity to the next level too.
