Canvas | Community | The Beacon

Headquartered in Leuven (Belgium) and with research sites across Belgium, in the Netherlands, Taiwan and the USA, an rep offices in China and Japan, imec leverages its state-of-the-art R&D infrastructure and its team of about 4,000 expert scientists, to drive open innovation across the globe. They unite world-industry leaders, Flanders-based and international companies, start-ups, and academia and knowledge centers, for R&D in nano-electronics and digital technologies, including advanced semiconductor scaling, silicon photonics, smart health, smart energy, smart mobility and smart cities solutions, artificial intelligence, beyond-5G and sensing technologies and more.

Next to its R&D offering, imec also leverages its expertise and large international industry network to support smaller organizations that have limited in-house R&D resources as well as larger companies with their innovation process from initial idea to fully functioning product, from the design of a product or chip, to prototyping, testing and optimizing, and manufacturing.

Finally, imec supports tech start-ups and scale-ups with a tailored offering. The imec.istart program is a business acceleration program that provides tech entrepreneurs with specialized coaching, facilities and overall support to help them grow their businesses, while the imec.scale-ups program focuses on larger innovative tech scale-ups looking to conquer the European market.

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Commissioned by the Flemish government, Lantis is building connections that make the city and region flourish. Lantis is responsible for the realisation of the Oosterweel connection, which will increase prosperity and improve the quality of life. Lantis is contributing to this by promoting mobility, including the construction of numerous bicycle connections and multimodal junctions on the city outskirts of Antwerp.

Lantis strives for operational excellence in order to carry out projects as efficiently as possible and deliver quality. Thanks to intensive cooperation with the surrounding area, the organisation works transparently and with a focus on results. Innovation and transformation ensure future-oriented projects with a lasting impact on the dynamics of the region. This is the Lantis way of successfully realising large projects in an urban environment.

Lantis stands for Liveable Antwerp through Innovation and Cooperation and is a public limited company. The day-to-day management is in the hands of the management committee led by managing director Luc Hellemans. David Van Herreweghe chairs the board of directors.

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As Europe’s second-largest port and largest integrated chemical cluster, the Port of Antwerp Bruges is a major lifeline for the Belgian economy: annually around 238 million tonnes of international maritime freight are handled. The Port of Antwerp Bruges accounts, directly and indirectly, for a total of around 143.000 jobs and more than €20 billion added value.

Innovation and digitisation enable our mission to be ‘a home port for a sustainable future’ as we aim to flexibly respond to a rapidly evolving maritime market. By supporting The Beacon, we want to ensure that our port platform finds relevant points of contact and vice versa. Furthermore, we want to facilitate the exchange effect created through the ecosystem being built around The Beacon.

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The city of Antwerp welcomes businesses, researchers, citizens and city officials to experiment with smart technologies that aim to make urban life more enjoyable and sustainable. Antwerp is a living lab where solutions are tested and co-created with its inhabitants. The city is home to highly innovative businesses and with 171 nationalities that live in Antwerp, it is above all a very diverse, and international city. The Ecosystem in Antwerp is developing rapidly, over the past years the amount of start-ups and scaleups in Antwerp doubled.

Innovative companies are the driving force behind the Antwerp knowledge economy. Their growth is crucial for our future. The City of Antwerp therefore strongly believes in the power of digital networking and is developing an ecosystem for digital innovation in which large and small businesses, startups, scaleups, researchers and capital providers with an interest in the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence can meet each other. Thanks to the cross-pollination that occurs in The Beacon, innovative products are developed that are relevant to Antwerp’s ‘smart city’ ambitions and to our financial stakeholders: industry and logistics.

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The University of Antwerp is a research university where pioneering, innovative research is conducted at an international level. Research and education are closely linked, with 20,000 students and 6000 staff spread across our nine faculties. As a driving force in the Antwerp innovation ecosystem, innovation is a constant focus.

The Beacon is the university’s pioneering pre-incubation structure for the domain of Metropolitanism, Smart City, Mobility & Logistics. It houses the IDLab research group and the Design Sciences Hub.

The IDLab research group of the University of Antwerp and imec performs fundamental and applied research on Wireless technologies, Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things. IDLab, headed by prof. Steven Latré, targets the most daunting challenges industry is facing to deliver digital transformation, connecting everything and extracting high value from data. Bringing researchers and industrial partners together at the same location facilitates knowledge transfer and enables the cross-fertilization and co-creation insights on smart cities, IoT and AI towards the industrial partners in The Beacon.

The Design Sciences Hub of the Faculty of Design Sciences is an interdisciplinary innovation and valorization lab. They offer design solutions for urban challenges and wicked problems in the triangle of urban planning, built environment, and urban health.

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Peripass and Robovision combine vision learning with innovative yard management solutions

Awesome news from our two community members Peripass and Robovision. They have combined vision learning with innovative yard management solutions in a proof-of-concept for 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐫 𝐋𝐨𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐬 at the H.Essers site.

Read all about it here

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Seafar - article in the Dutch Weekblad Schuttevaer

Interesting feature in the Dutch Weekblad Schuttevaer: "The future is closer than you think. This is clear from the emergence of remotely operated sailing. Seafar in Antwerp shows that sailing without or with a reduced crew on board is no longer science fiction." #smartshipping #MASS

Link to Schuttevaer: https://lnkd.in/djtzKp4r

Link via website Seafar (ENG): https://lnkd.in/dFqxJBeS

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Mobito - the best Belgium based Transportation companies

Happy to be featuring among the top Belgium based Transportation start-up companies worth to watch!

This article showcases our top picks for the best Belgium based Transportation companies. These startups and companies are taking a variety of approaches to innovating the Transportation industry, but are all exceptional companies well worth a follow.

We tried to pick companies across the size spectrum from cutting edge startups to established brands.

We selected these startups and companies for exceptional performance in one of these categories:

Innovation
- Innovative ideas
- Innovative route to market
- Innovative product
Growth
- Exceptional growth
- Exceptional growth strategy
Management
Societal impact

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LinkedCar - Award most innovative Autotech startup in Belgium

𝐋𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐞𝐝𝐂𝐚𝐫 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐛𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐢𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐀𝐮𝐭𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐩 𝐢𝐧 𝐁𝐞𝐥𝐠𝐢𝐮𝐦! 🍾🏆
𝐒𝐨 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦, 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐜𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐬, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐬! 💪
Corporate Vision captured the moment in the latest issue of their Corporate Vision Magazine!

Check it out via: https://lnkd.in/eFT_h2H

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Innotractor - Nominated as a Top Internet of Things Company

We Were Nominated as a Top Internet of Things Company in The Netherlands by BestStartup.eu. Thanks for the recognition BestStartup.eu!

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