best practices

Exciting labs

Place of experimentation and experience in Remscheid - ToolLab for the craft  

Awakening enthusiasm for craftsmanship – that is what the new ToolLab in Remscheid wants to do. It is part of the idea not only to create an extracurricular place of learning for the region of the Bergisch city triangle, but to push an entire district. In this lab, young people, parents and teachers can tackle things themselves and implement their own ideas. This is how they experience digital craftsmanship up close. 

5G Co:Creation Lab Cologne – part of a whole ecosystem 

The 5G Co:Creation Lab on the Mühlheim campus of the TH Köln offers founders from the university environment together with industrial partners the exclusive opportunity to test and further develop their ideas directly in the new 5G network. Because many perspectives come together co-creatively with interdisciplinary knowledge, new opportunities arise. It is part of an entrepreneurship cluster in the sense of an entire ecosystem for technologically sophisticated innovations.

Here the Cologne universities, the university founder network cologne eV as well as business and industry work closely together. The universities bundle their start-up services under the common “Gateway” brand. The "Fit for Invest" project addresses the topics of entrepreneurship and start-up support. The Gateway excellence startup center offers start-up coaching, funding advice, incubator places and an accelerator. Since Gateway was founded in 2020, the first successes have already been celebrated. For example, FIMO Health prevailed against 30 start-ups in the StageTwo start-up competition and raised 150.000 euros.

From our point of view, an exemplary strategy. In this way, start-up and innovation activities are bundled and usable for an entire region.

lessons learned

Experiences & Recommendations

Specifically, we proceeded as follows: We were able to win over a medical supply store, test users and a university to participate and also involve the Federal Technical School for Orthopedic Technology in workshops. They have been involved in very different roles and with very different intensities. In addition, we used the Fab16 for a challenge and in this way involved the entire Fab community.

A critical question is often: How do we find the right cooperation partners? In this project we were able to draw from the existing innovation ecosystem. This approach also contributes to the fact that the partners usually go well together, even if they don’t know each other before. As the project coordinator, we defined the major subject area. We worked out the specific question together with the crafts company. The result was the task of developing a monitoring and feedback system that measures the plantar pressure and temperature in an orthosis in order to detect any wound formation at an early stage and thus avoid it. The development should lead to a prototype within four months.  

At the beginning of the prototyping process, it was necessary to create a deeper understanding of the disease problem, user needs, and the medical supply store's motivations and experiences for the development. Only then could concrete requirements for the system be defined. The Design Thinking method was used because it does not assume a linear process and creates a balance between user needs, feasibility and economic viability during development. Scrum was used to effectively partition the existing work packages during prototype development.

During the sprints, new functional prototypes of each component of the system were made using various digital manufacturing techniques to get quick feedback from prosthetists and identify areas for improvement. This prototyping cycle was repeated several times. The strict legal requirements for the development of medical products as to when patients may be included for the first time had to be taken into account. 

Process steps: