DTU Skylab

DTU Skylab is the innovation and entrepreneurship hub of the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), established in 2013 in Kongens Lyngby to shorten the path from research idea to product by bringing students, researchers and corporate partners into one shared space.

What it does: Skylab offers prototyping labs (sustainable food, biotechnology, chemistry, digital technologies), coaching, courses and office space, growing from an initial prototype workshop to more than 5,000 m2 of facilities. In 2022 alone it recorded 171,861 visits, helped develop 571 prototypes, coached 365 start-up projects, ran 127 events and 30 courses for over 2,000 students, and worked with 75 partner organisations (43 of them from industry).

Results: over its first decade (2013-2023) DTU Skylab contributed to roughly 850 new businesses, about 80 a year. More broadly, DTU as a university now spins out around 100 companies annually; in 2024, DTU-founded startups (25 of them) attracted DKK 1.8 billion in venture funding, equal to 21% of the entire Danish venture-capital market that year. Alumni companies include Reshape Biotech, Dynelectro, Kvasir Technologies and Agrobiomics.

Why it is a good practice: a single university-run facility has sustained a decade of measurable startup formation and, by 2024, was linked to over a fifth of all Danish venture capital in a single year — an unusually concrete, market-level knowledge-transfer outcome for a university innovation hub.

Caveat: the 21%-of-Danish-VC and 1.8bn DKK figures describe funding raised by DTU-affiliated founders broadly, not funding raised specifically by companies that passed through Skylab's programmes, so the causal link between Skylab's own activities and this headline figure is indicative rather than directly measured.

Read the full analysis: https://www.skylab.dtu.dk/