Ten start-ups accepted the company’s invitation and developed together with B. Braun employees the first steps for their common project and discussed the medical technology company’s specific requirements. The workshop marked the beginning of a six-month program that offers selected start-ups the opportunity to improve their “product-market fit” and win over B. Braun as an important partner and customer. The goal of B. Braun is to try out new solutions and technologies and, if successful, implement them.

“As an international company with more than 64,000 employees, B. Braun, just like the start-ups, needs innovation and the spirit of research,” said B. Braun CEO Anna Maria Braun. “Innovation and new ideas arise from the communication and interaction with clients and external partners. That’s why we started the B. Braun Accelerator Program in 2017, which enables us to engage in dialogue and cooperation with start-ups,” explained Braun.

The tender for the Accelerator was met with lots of interest in the start-up scene also in the second round: “Altogether 387 start-ups took part in the tender,” summarizes Alexander Katzung, Vice President Acceleration & Innovation at B. Braun. “In the end, we decided on ten start-ups that offer the most promising solutions to our challenges,” says Katzung.

The Motion Miners project highlights how different and creative the start-ups’ ideas for solutions can be. The product analyzes and optimizes unnecessary and unhealthy movements in a manual work process, for example, in production or in hospitals’ day-to-day, and thereby allows for an ergonomic and efficient way of working. Conversely, the developers of the RenalTracker app are dedicated to the life of patients with kidney diseases and would like to contribute to making their everyday lives simpler and more easygoing. The app is oriented towards kidney patients who are not yet reliant on dialysis. With the help of the applications, they can adapt their everyday life to their disease so that they can live without dialysis treatments for as long as possible.

The workshop served as the launch of the B. Braun Accelerator Collaboration Program. In the upcoming six months, boot camps will take place in which different use-cases, as well as B. Braun-specific technologies and solutions will be formulated. After a pilot phase, the analysis of the results will take place in October and be presented as part of a Demo Day. Afterwards, the decision will be made as to whether a permanent cooperation will result from the Collaboration Program.

The following start-ups were selected:

https://www.renaltracker.com/            https://www.motionminers.com/

https://botconnect.ai/                          https://www.tye.io/

https://wakeo.co/                                https://www.userlane.com/

https://www.doks-innovation.com/     https://jobpal.ai/de/

https://craftworks.at/                           https://fino.ai/