Past events | Innovation

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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Expert Team Smart Industry

A community meeting to discuss the topics/activities of the Smart Industry Week

Tall Ships Races

The Beacon was offered as a base for the young sailors of the big ships, to relax, call their families and enjoy our magnificent sky terras. In return, we were offered a unique tour on one of the ships before the public opening.

Visit to the Port of Liège

We brought the community intelligence of The Beacon to Liège for a meeting on smart ports and logistics. We got to connect with the Liège Port authority and MUPOL, and visited some sites like the DPW container terminal, covered dock of the port of Monsin and the multimodal platform Trilogiport.

The Beacon Summer Festival

To reward our community and welcome the many new community members, we organised a casual Summer Festival with a cocktailbar, winetasting, VR-games, a delicious BBQ and relaxing dj-beats.

Visit to the Port of Zeebrugge

The ports of Antwerp and Zeebrugge recently merged into Port of Antwerp Bruges. The perfect opportunity for our community to learn about the sea port of Zeebrugge. We learned more about the Port activities, 5G strategy and projects, and the use of data and AI in the Port ecosystem. Afterwards, we made a super interesting bustour through the port environment, where we ended at the largest car terminal in the world, ICO.

Mississippi Delegates

The State of Mississippi is known for its magnolias, catfish, bluegrass music, and southern charm....but its second largest city - Gulfport - has quite an important port right at the Gulf of Mexico.

On Friday May 13th, a large delegation from Mississippi - including private companies & corporates - visited the Antwerp port & innovation ecosystem. And they will stop at The Beacon for a meet & greet with our community members.

Community Night @ SPACE - The Human Quest

City of Antwerp kindly invited the startup & innovation communities in Antwerp to the brand new SPACE - The Human Quest exposition. Great turnout with many Beaconeers enjoying Europe's most fascinating space exhibition, entirely organized and curated by the team of Startups.be | Scale-ups.eu.

Ten Miles Antwerp - Community Team

The Beacon Community Team was again present at the Antwerp Ten Miles. To kick off this famous event, we had lunch with some of our runners and handed over their starting numbers.

Data Governance with Azure Purview

A full house and 60+ pizzas @ The Beacon! Data Meetup Antwerp and The Beacon invited their communities to get an update on the latest Microsoft Azure Purview technology. Special guest Torsten Otto testified from the perspective of a user, Atlas Copco.

InnoEnergy BIZ Bootcamp - Innovation Competition

The Beacon was the scenery for a great afternoon in which 50 international students of the MSc Energy for Smart Cities program pitched their best innovation ideas. Congratulations to the winning team that came up with "Stick-Heat", an innovative way to use solar panel (strips) to improve energy-efficiency in classified buildings!

Enter the Metaverse

ANTWERP.POWERED.BY.CREATIVES and The Beacon joined forces for an inspirational evening session on the Metaverse. Expert Vincent Buyssens, Beaconeer Microsoft and local pioneer HB Antwerp shared their perspective on the potential of the Metaverse

Space @ The Beacon

Flanders Space, the new cluster for the space industry, presented its organization, services and opportunities to The Beacon Community. Verhaert explained the funding & project opportunities of ESA Space Solutions Belgium, and Pauline Van Ostaeyen illustrated how she used this channel to integrate space data in the Dockflow platform. To close off, Leen Anthuenis presented the outlines of the grand exposition "Space - The Human Quest", which will kick off on 23 April in Antwerp.

Community Evening - Wij, Robots

Lode Lauwaert, professor in Philosophy of Technology at KULeuven, presented his recent book "Wij Robots" to the community. In a lively debate, prof. Lauwaert engaged in a discussion with the community about the neutrality of AI, disruptive technology, moral responsibility and sustainability.

Visit Deputy Prime Minister Petra De Sutter

As Minister for Telecommunications, Ms Petra De Sutter will soon bring 5G to the commercial market in Belgium. Anticipating the auction of the licenses, she visited The Beacon and Port of Antwerp for an inspirational field trip, to witness the possibilities of digital technology. Three companies provided a demonstration to Minister De Sutter in our building, after which the delegation went to the nautical operating center in the Port of Antwerp, to witness automated drone flights, and an autonomous depth gauging boat.

Visit Vice-Mayor Caluwaerts

Ms Erica Caluwaerts, Vice-Mayor for Innovation at the City of Antwerp, took an entire day to visit The Beacon. Aside from bilateral meetings with a number or residents, and a team experience at Strides, the Vice-Mayor and her team joined 15 community members for a lively lunch debate on the digital innovation opportunities in the City of Antwerp

IoT Bootcamp Graduation

The first batch of IoT Bootcamp participants graduated on February 3rd! Congratulations to Iristick, MyPitch, Toyfoo and ID Diamonds for attending the first edition of this five-day class!

The IoT Bootcamp is a flash course, entirely organized by members of our Community, to speed up the growth of your IoT project. It contains general masterclasses on how to set up a succesful IoT company and product, and technical courses on specific aspects such as wireless connectivity, sensors, data and security.

Together we take it to the next level

Missed an event?

Missed an event?

Expert Team Smart Industry

Tall Ships Races

Visit to the Port of Liège

The Beacon Summer Festival

Visit to the Port of Zeebrugge

Stay informed!

Mississippi Delegates

Community Night @ SPACE - The Human Quest

Ten Miles Antwerp - Community Team

Data Governance with Azure Purview

InnoEnergy BIZ Bootcamp - Innovation Competition

Enter the Metaverse

Stay informed!

Space @ The Beacon

Community Evening - Wij, Robots

Visit Deputy Prime Minister Petra De Sutter

Visit Vice-Mayor Caluwaerts

IoT Bootcamp Graduation

Expert Team Smart Industry

Tall Ships Races

Visit to the Port of Liège

The Beacon Summer Festival

Visit to the Port of Zeebrugge

Mississippi Delegates

Community Night @ SPACE - The Human Quest

Ten Miles Antwerp - Community Team

Data Governance with Azure Purview

InnoEnergy BIZ Bootcamp - Innovation Competition

Enter the Metaverse

Space @ The Beacon

Community Evening - Wij, Robots

Visit Deputy Prime Minister Petra De Sutter

Visit Vice-Mayor Caluwaerts

IoT Bootcamp Graduation