ROVALMA participates in matchmaking event promoted by the EIC pilot and Saint-Gobain

The European Innovation Council (EIC) pilot and Saint-Gobain promoted a matchmaking day for startups and scaleups working in the sector of advanced materials and innovative manufacturing technologies. On 22-23 May 2019, ROVALMA was one of the 15 companies pitching and meeting Saint-Gobain in Paris.

The companies in attendance were selected based on their innovative approaches to advanced materials and innovative manufacturing technologies, among others. From the corporate side, there were representatives from Saint-Gobain.

ROVALMA shared its vision for disruptive Material Solutions that optimize the cost and resource efficiency of industrial component production (e.g. composites, plastics, light alloys), significantly reduced part costs & lead times, improved geometric flexibility & environmental balance. “Our new high thermal conductivity mold/die steels enable highly accurate, large, complex, high-strength, lightweight parts”, explains Pere Ferrer, Project Manager at Rovalma’s Application Engineering Department.

Thomas Kinisky, Senior Vice-President, Chief Innovation Officer and Chairman North America stressed the importance of working with smaller companies: “Startups and scaleups are sensing what happens in terms of technology and in terms of markets. If we can embrace them and bring that sensing into Saint-Gobain, take that external view and internalise it, it’s a big benefit for us as a company. It makes us speeding up our development, finding business models that we weren’t event thinking about, and finding technical concepts that we had never seen before. Open innovation is definitely a priority for us.”

Minas Apelian, Director NOVA External Ventures, highlighted the quality of companies he met: “The European Innovation Council has a great network of SMEs that it’s connected with. The entrepreneurs I met today are highly passionate and very diverse in the projects and the thinking. I’m certain the ideas presented today will be an inspiration for our business teams.”

“We’re very happy to have participated in this matchmaking day promoted by the EIC pilot business acceleration services in St-Gobain. We believe our solutions can be of enormous benefit for St Gobain and a partnership with St Gobain can help us significantly scale-up our business”, states Pere Ferrer.

The purpose of the EIC Corporate Days is to promote business between big corporates – which are always looking for innovative solutions to improve their products and services – and the SMEs funded by the EIC pilot.