Enovia was founded 4 years ago. Their portfolio does not consist of products, their portfolio is made of companies.

So how
does it work? It owns a share of the companies and they support and owns a full or a share of the execution of the
companies. The companies in their portfolio ae the following:

o Sixto: they created a robotic 6th finger for injured people who have no more the ability to move fingers.
The project was born from a research group.
o Blusole: the idea of having active shoes (traction control, levelling control, using air)
o Stem: a system of helicopters
o Weart: a ring that provides tactile and temperature inputs (vibration, force, heat) to cooperate with a
smartphone
o Myair: to monitor the reading performance
o Blugyro: helps stabilizing the seat of the baby in the back part of the bicycle
o Bluagro: monitoring with real camera the health of the crops
o Airselfie: it is already on the market. It consists of a video camera as a companion of your smartphone
o Effortless mobility: electrification of a baby stroller
o Blimp: it helps people to measure how many and how long other persons are looking to an advertising in
different media channels or a tv
o Y.share: you put the second key of your car and you can instantly turn it into a car sharing system
o Blubrake: ABS System for bicycles
o Hyride: provide electronic suspension for race bicycles
o E-Schock: digital chassis-building for cars, building the chassis with all the electronics inside, and that it
can be provided to people with already integrated components

The success of their business model and execution model lies in the fact that it fills a gap in the journey of nurturing
startups. To explain this, first we need to understand through which stages does a startup goes through:

There are three waves for nurturing startups: incubation, acceleration and factory core. In the incubation step, teams start
building and defining the idea, they explore the market, develop and implement the design thinking methodology and
finally develop a paper-sketch of the service or product. Then in the acceleration step, they work on defining their business
model, how will they sell their product, through which channels, with which suppliers they will work, which revenue
streams will they have and how their cost structure will be like. Finally, in the factory core step, they turn the ideas into
reality, from the paper, to tangible products or services. This is the first big obstacle, where most of the startups fail and
do not continue anymore. Why? Because there are several complex situations, for example, going through a funding
process is not so easy, achieving the first sale is something not taught in school and be able to do several and rapid iteration
processes is difficult, specially when this depends on each of the team member’s vision, the market knowledge, funding
and human resources.

For the case of ideas born from research projects (either from a university, research group, research institution, students,
doctors, or any person who developed the idea from a research process), ideas die due to 2 main causes:

a) The complexity of turning ideas in paper to tangible ideas, which was mentioned above.
b) The fact that the road to Technology Transfer TT is complex, as the environment is different to the completely
focused business environment.

So, which are the obstacles that an idea encounters in the road to TT?

1. The Professor “I want it all” syndrome: professors want to be everywhere, doing everything. And as professors
are usually the ones that lead a research project, their varied activities take a lot of time from them, which could
be invested in the project. These activities could be:
- They have full time academic position
- They need to go to conferences
 - Teaching and students’ supervision
- They have a role in university
- Search for funds and money for research
- They occupy editorial roles

2. “I know it all” syndrome

- They are scientists in its own field. Experts in a specific niche.

3. The rising star – the career dilemma:

- They need to decide on whether to join the spin-off or stay in their scientific and research career

4. The young brilliant engineer – the risk-averse mom

- Mothers, parents or other people, which have a near relationship with the people involved in the research
projects sometime drive them or try to convince them that it would be better to work in a big and nice
company.
- They believe entrepreneurship represents a high risk.

5. The part-time cancer of startups

- All the people of the startup try to work half-time
- Why? because they have a risk-adverse attitude, risk distribution strategy, failure is socially stigmatized

6. The almost finished disease of the forever-prototype syndrome

- I am the genius – someone else will finish the job
- Idea overrating

7. The boring industrialization melancholy

Unable to:
- stop innovation
- focus on implementation
- focus on quality and details

8. The loneliness: the “garage “is not so nice

9. The consulting-company blackhole

- Spinoffs, become a consulting company
- They do not deliver a product

10. Story-telling is equity mermaid

- Story telling (equity) value is extremely attractive (short-time rewarding)
- Is it real value?
- Most is success-story telling because you do not have big improvements
- But it can also become dangerous (real value is it real?) (Be practical)

Enovia, in order to deal and cure this 10 syndromes or pains, is convinced that these 4 pillars need to be present in the
environment:

1. Strong and focused research groups (inside university)

2. An efficient IP-management and TT-office (to manage correctly every success story)
3. Partner with Venture Capital Funds (A+B- round) is not the big problem
4. Partner with “execution company(ies)”
And therefore, Enovia developed “their recipe”:

1. Strong multidisciplinary “one-stop-shop” team (100 people to 50 people to start)

a. Engineers
b. Industrial engineers
c. Business developers
d. Production (quality) experts
e. Legal]/Administrations
2. A strong and entrepreneurship orientated full time top-manages
3. Access to top universities, which generate top R&D products
4. These universities and research groups are ready to produce deal flow
5. Easy access to talent, universities are there and are open to collaborate
6. High profile investors
7. High level tech R&D

And have in mind, that the business model is not as the one of accelerators and therefore, University Accelerators are
not a competition for your model, but a key cooperation partner.

Enovia is a one-stop-shop, where a startup or idea can find different tools, experience and points of view, to go from
paper-planning to real execution.

In general, it would be very interesting to start working on a project like this one in Mexico. Why? Because from my
experience, specifically at Tec de Monterrey, there are lots of research projects that are carried out along the year in the
university, and the most of them just end in a scientific paper or publication; instead of taking it to the next step, where,
in collaboration with a business input point of view, the research project or idea could be commercialized for the benefit
of the community, society and the customer itself.