We just landed our first grant from the European Union

The traverse crane system Conhoist is now going to be IoT-enabled – thanks to a grant from the EU-program ‘Eurostars’ and our Polish partners.

Funding through grants has been crucial to getting our inventions off the ground ever since Lolle & Nielsen Inventions was founded a decade ago.

We’ve had a lot of success with Danish programs, but for several years, we’ve also talked about grants from the European Union. The EU-programs are often prominent and huge, but that also means that the competition is fierce – which decreases the chance to actually get them. At the same time, we’ve also been a bit anxious about the enormous EU-system which comes with a huge workload when applying as well as loads of reporting.

However, after wandering around possibilities for a few years, we decided to take our chance and apply for the first time this summer. And we were happily surprised when the Eurostar-program got back to us just before Christmas and announced that they had granted us the funds we applied for.

Conhoist and IoT

We applied for the Eurostars-program to get support to implement IoT to our traverse crane solution ’Conhoist’. And thanks to the grant, this technology will now be added to the system.

 

This addition allows for more monitoring of the traverse crane system: how much is loaded onto the system, how frequently is it used etc. While those are nice additions in themselves, the big upside with adding IoT is the fact, that it allows for new business models.

By monitoring the system closely, we will be able to offer ”lift as a service” – users pay e.g. per tonne they lift with the system – instead of simply selling or renting the solution.

While several stakeholders in the market have already placed preorders on the system without IoT, they also see huge upsides in the addition. For that reason, we expect the IoT-implementation to make it easier to establish our new invention on the market. With this new business model, it will be possible to implement the system on large building sites and charge the individual subcontractors based on how much they use the system. And honestly: What’s better than a ’no cure – no pay’-model?

Eurostars with our Polish partner

As with most EU-programs, Eurostars is aimed at supporting big ideas across the union. What makes this program special, is the fact that funding is only given to partnerships across borders.

This means, that we will not be working on the IoT-side of Conhoist ourselves; the new technology will be developed alongside our partners specialised in electronics and firmware from Poland over the next two years.

In the meantime, however, we will keep testing the system – without IoT – and we expect Conhoist to take a huge leap forward over the next six months.