SMART Start-up: Sustainable Scientist-Entrepreneur – The New Inspiring and Innovative Player

The organisers of the 7th Early Career Scientists Conference for Climate and Marine Research invited us to deliver a short SMART start-up training to bring a new element into the discussion of current insights, challenges, and perspectives when discussing the effects of changing Earth systems: sustainable innovation.

Sustainable innovation has not been a common discussion topic among PhD researchers on climate and marine sciences. Neither has entrepreneurship or peoples’ lifestyles.

How can knowledge and experience be extracted out of the lab and translated into a concrete solution with the potential of becoming a business?

In our SMART Start-ups facilitated discussions, young scientists discovered links between their professional and personal activities to potential sustainable innovations. The important goal was to help them “think out of the box” and become a “sustainable scientist-entrepreneur”, a term coined by one of the workshop’s participants.

Towards the end of the session, some participants were already keen to bring their solutions to potential stakeholders while others wanted to learn more about business modelling as they began to see the potential of these tools within their current work.

As an introduction to sustainable innovation, SMART Start-up was regarded as a “great way to find connections between my research, sustainability, and the sustainable development goals. We definitely need more sessions like this in our PhD seminars to help us think differently.”