The ESA Business Incubation Centre (BIC) Sweden was innaugurated on December 18, 2015. The headquarter is located in Luleå and it will be managed by Arctic Business Incubator, one of the members of the project RIT, within a consortium together with Uppsala Innovation Centre (UIC) located in Uppsala just north of Stockholm and Innovatum incubator (IAB) located in Trollhättan in the west of Sweden just north of Göteborg.

– Finally ESA BIC Sweden is innaugurated and will soon be up and running, says Jens Lundström, Manager of ESA BIC Sweden and CEO of Arctic Business Incubator (ABI) in Norrbotten. Our goal is to inspire and support entrepreneurs to turn space connected business ideas to commercial companies. The RIT project will have an important role by helping to create interesting meeting points and fruitful collaboration between academy, space industry and the innovation support system, Mr. Lundström concludes.

ABI is one of the key players in RIT’s work package 3 “Initiating an innovation support system for space business”. The rest of the group consists of LTU Business AB, Progressum and Kiruna Kommun.

– We are aiming to build up a strong innovation ecosystem in our region and link it to the national and European system, said Johanna Bergtröm-Roos, RIT Project Manager and Head of WP3, LTU Business. We will work on the whole chain, from arranging interesting meeting points were new ideas take shape to workshops for idea acceleration and technology transfers, Bergström-Roos concluded.

All the five space companies within the RIT project are technical members of the Swedish Space Incubator: GKN Aerospace, OHB Sweden, Swdish Space Corporation, NanoSpace and ÅAC Microtec, and will offer technical support to new ideas when suitable.

-The inauguration of the Swedish space incubator is an important step towards strengthening Sweden’s role as a leading actor within innovation, says Dr. Olle Norberg, GD of the Swedish national space board. We need and welcome new entrepreneurs or existing companies to make use of space technology in new ways, to solve a wide spectra of challenges in our society, concludes Dr. Norberg.

Read more about ESA BIC Sweden and how to join the ESA BIC here