The Month in Review — October 2025

October is behind us, and it has been yet another incredibly busy month at DTU Skylab and at the departments, I support in my work; DTU Compute and DTU Construct. The end of 2025 is fast approaching, and aside from finishing off the year in style, we’re also busy looking forward to 2026 and how to ensure the great momentum keeps going in the new year.

For me personally I am — as per usual — splitting my time between helping a lot of teams mature their startup cases and on projects that span more across Skylab. It is super fun and inspiring, but it is also taking it’s toll, and when I get into crazy busy periods such as the one, we’re currently in, I do feel that there are limits as to what more, I can take on. But I try to utilize my experience to manage it in the best possible way.

In the past couple of weeks, I have spent quite a lot of time helping teams finish their applications for the upcoming round of the DTU internal PoC (Proof-of-Concept) grants. I have quite a few teams applying, and aside from hopefully being able to help out, it is also a great opportunity to get a clear pitch-like sense of where they are right now on their journey.

When I look at what they are doing, and how they are working, I am filled with excitement and confidence that in the coming couple of years, we will see some pretty cool and impactful startups spinning out.

Aside from working with the teams, I have also spent a great deal of my time being involved in different kinds of more strategic work at DTU.

One of the things, we did in October was to host a big innovation bootcamp and inviting all the major contributors to the innovation ecosystem at DTU to join us. I was one of the organizers of the event, and it was good to see a lot of people join in for discussions about the present state of the ecosystem, celebrate the successes and share ideas about how we can do even better going forward.

At the event we had the good fortune of being joined by three amazing DTU researchers, who have all either built spinouts or are in the process of building one (or more), and I thoroughly enjoyed moderating the session (see picture above), where they shared their experiences about working within the innovation ecosystem. After all these are the trailblazers, we’re doing all this for, so getting their perspective on what it feels to be ‘on the receiving end’ of it all is both super inspiring and valuable to us and out ability to keep supporting them in the best possible way.

As a personal reflection I think that since I have been here a bit more than a year now, I am starting to get a deeper understanding of how things work and why. With that also comes ideas for things, we might want to try out and test as new ways of looking at things and supporting teams. And keeping the researchers and the teams at the center of all this, and firmly in the ultimately drivers seat, is absolutely key to success going forward. After all, at the end of the day they will be ones behind the spinouts, hopefully utilizing everything we as an innovation ecosystem have to offer, in the most potent way.

Other projects

With all the things going on right now, there is still no real bandwidth for doing other things.

Having said that I of course remain curious about what’s brewing around me. It is one of many great benefits of my role: Having the best vantage point for all the cool new stuff. I love it!

…This and that

Despite all the work, I managed to take a weeks vacation with my girls during October. We utilized the autumn break in the Danish schools to surprice the kids with a trip to London.

We travelled from Tuesday to Tuesday in order to get the cheapest place tickets, and we stayed at a Premier Inn near Paddington Station. It proved to be a really nice place and a good starting point for exploring London and just let ourselves be drawn to whatever we found interesting.

Or kind of. Because, holy s*** London is expensive. Everything has become ‘an experience’ and is being charged accordingly. We managed to avoid it all and focus only on the free stuff, i.e. a couple of the most famous museums.

I absolutely love the concept about making museums free to visit, and I think it is especially important in these times, where real knowledge and knowledge of history is under heavy attack from social media, fake news and algorithms looking to sow more division than unity among us.

My favorite moment from the vacation was thus also to take my youngest on a tour through both the Egyptian and the Greek sections of the British Museum and just marvel at her curiosity and questions, as we looked at some of all the invaluable artifacts.

That couple of hours gave me hope (not that I lacked it to begin with) that maybe it is not too late to teach our children the value of real knowledge and the origins of what has made us who we are today.

Let that be the end note for this months review. I will leave you with another highlight of our trip albeit in a totally different direction than the above. Sometimes you’re just starstruck.

See you in a months time!