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 €. On the basis of this experience, the article offers recommendations to other technology incubators and technological entrepreneurship programmes.