Beyond Traditional Entrepreneurship Education in Engineering Promoting IoT start-ups from universities

This article presents an innovative experience in which a research group on Industrial Electronics of the Technical University of Cartagena promotes the creation of a startup accelerator (Cloud Incubator HUB) in topics related to the Internet of Things. During the first period (2012-2015), its scope was limited to the Region of Murcia, in the southeast of Spain. From the results obtained in this first experience, the action was elevated to a European level and was given the title of Startup Scaleup. The Cloud Incubator HUB, supported by BluSpecs, invited three other European accelerators to become partners in the programme: the Ryan Academy (Dublin), Crosspring (Zoetermeer) and the Open Club Coffee (Vilnius) and became part of the Startup Europe ecosystem. After two years (2015-2016) of cooperation the results obtained are encouraging: 132 Internet of Things mature start-ups from 20 EU countries have participated in the programme. To date, they have obtained investments of over 12M (sic). On the basis of this experience, the article offers recommendations to other technology incubators and technological entrepreneurship programmes.