Past events | Innovation

Headquartered in Leuven (Belgium) and with research sites across Belgium, in the Netherlands, Taiwan and the USA, an rep offices in China and Japan, imec leverages its state-of-the-art R&D infrastructure and its team of about 4,000 expert scientists, to drive open innovation across the globe. They unite world-industry leaders, Flanders-based and international companies, start-ups, and academia and knowledge centers, for R&D in nano-electronics and digital technologies, including advanced semiconductor scaling, silicon photonics, smart health, smart energy, smart mobility and smart cities solutions, artificial intelligence, beyond-5G and sensing technologies and more.

Next to its R&D offering, imec also leverages its expertise and large international industry network to support smaller organizations that have limited in-house R&D resources as well as larger companies with their innovation process from initial idea to fully functioning product, from the design of a product or chip, to prototyping, testing and optimizing, and manufacturing.

Finally, imec supports tech start-ups and scale-ups with a tailored offering. The imec.istart program is a business acceleration program that provides tech entrepreneurs with specialized coaching, facilities and overall support to help them grow their businesses, while the imec.scale-ups program focuses on larger innovative tech scale-ups looking to conquer the European market.

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Commissioned by the Flemish government, Lantis is building connections that make the city and region flourish. Lantis is responsible for the realisation of the Oosterweel connection, which will increase prosperity and improve the quality of life. Lantis is contributing to this by promoting mobility, including the construction of numerous bicycle connections and multimodal junctions on the city outskirts of Antwerp.

Lantis strives for operational excellence in order to carry out projects as efficiently as possible and deliver quality. Thanks to intensive cooperation with the surrounding area, the organisation works transparently and with a focus on results. Innovation and transformation ensure future-oriented projects with a lasting impact on the dynamics of the region. This is the Lantis way of successfully realising large projects in an urban environment.

Lantis stands for Liveable Antwerp through Innovation and Cooperation and is a public limited company. The day-to-day management is in the hands of the management committee led by managing director Luc Hellemans. David Van Herreweghe chairs the board of directors.

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As Europe’s second-largest port and largest integrated chemical cluster, the Port of Antwerp Bruges is a major lifeline for the Belgian economy: annually around 238 million tonnes of international maritime freight are handled. The Port of Antwerp Bruges accounts, directly and indirectly, for a total of around 143.000 jobs and more than €20 billion added value.

Innovation and digitisation enable our mission to be ‘a home port for a sustainable future’ as we aim to flexibly respond to a rapidly evolving maritime market. By supporting The Beacon, we want to ensure that our port platform finds relevant points of contact and vice versa. Furthermore, we want to facilitate the exchange effect created through the ecosystem being built around The Beacon.

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The city of Antwerp welcomes businesses, researchers, citizens and city officials to experiment with smart technologies that aim to make urban life more enjoyable and sustainable. Antwerp is a living lab where solutions are tested and co-created with its inhabitants. The city is home to highly innovative businesses and with 171 nationalities that live in Antwerp, it is above all a very diverse, and international city. The Ecosystem in Antwerp is developing rapidly, over the past years the amount of start-ups and scaleups in Antwerp doubled.

Innovative companies are the driving force behind the Antwerp knowledge economy. Their growth is crucial for our future. The City of Antwerp therefore strongly believes in the power of digital networking and is developing an ecosystem for digital innovation in which large and small businesses, startups, scaleups, researchers and capital providers with an interest in the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence can meet each other. Thanks to the cross-pollination that occurs in The Beacon, innovative products are developed that are relevant to Antwerp’s ‘smart city’ ambitions and to our financial stakeholders: industry and logistics.

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The University of Antwerp is a research university where pioneering, innovative research is conducted at an international level. Research and education are closely linked, with 20,000 students and 6000 staff spread across our nine faculties. As a driving force in the Antwerp innovation ecosystem, innovation is a constant focus.

The Beacon is the university’s pioneering pre-incubation structure for the domain of Metropolitanism, Smart City, Mobility & Logistics. It houses the IDLab research group and the Design Sciences Hub.

The IDLab research group of the University of Antwerp and imec performs fundamental and applied research on Wireless technologies, Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things. IDLab, headed by prof. Steven Latré, targets the most daunting challenges industry is facing to deliver digital transformation, connecting everything and extracting high value from data. Bringing researchers and industrial partners together at the same location facilitates knowledge transfer and enables the cross-fertilization and co-creation insights on smart cities, IoT and AI towards the industrial partners in The Beacon.

The Design Sciences Hub of the Faculty of Design Sciences is an interdisciplinary innovation and valorization lab. They offer design solutions for urban challenges and wicked problems in the triangle of urban planning, built environment, and urban health.

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Ten Miles Antwerp - Community Team

The Beacon Community Team was again present at the Antwerp Ten Miles. To kick off this famous event, we had lunch with some of our runners and handed over their starting numbers.

Data Governance with Azure Purview

A full house and 60+ pizzas @ The Beacon! Data Meetup Antwerp and The Beacon invited their communities to get an update on the latest Microsoft Azure Purview technology. Special guest Torsten Otto testified from the perspective of a user, Atlas Copco.

InnoEnergy BIZ Bootcamp - Innovation Competition

The Beacon was the scenery for a great afternoon in which 50 international students of the MSc Energy for Smart Cities program pitched their best innovation ideas. Congratulations to the winning team that came up with "Stick-Heat", an innovative way to use solar panel (strips) to improve energy-efficiency in classified buildings!

Enter the Metaverse

ANTWERP.POWERED.BY.CREATIVES and The Beacon joined forces for an inspirational evening session on the Metaverse. Expert Vincent Buyssens, Beaconeer Microsoft and local pioneer HB Antwerp shared their perspective on the potential of the Metaverse

Space @ The Beacon

Flanders Space, the new cluster for the space industry, presented its organization, services and opportunities to The Beacon Community. Verhaert explained the funding & project opportunities of ESA Space Solutions Belgium, and Pauline Van Ostaeyen illustrated how she used this channel to integrate space data in the Dockflow platform. To close off, Leen Anthuenis presented the outlines of the grand exposition "Space - The Human Quest", which will kick off on 23 April in Antwerp.

Community Evening - Wij, Robots

Lode Lauwaert, professor in Philosophy of Technology at KULeuven, presented his recent book "Wij Robots" to the community. In a lively debate, prof. Lauwaert engaged in a discussion with the community about the neutrality of AI, disruptive technology, moral responsibility and sustainability.

Visit Deputy Prime Minister Petra De Sutter

As Minister for Telecommunications, Ms Petra De Sutter will soon bring 5G to the commercial market in Belgium. Anticipating the auction of the licenses, she visited The Beacon and Port of Antwerp for an inspirational field trip, to witness the possibilities of digital technology. Three companies provided a demonstration to Minister De Sutter in our building, after which the delegation went to the nautical operating center in the Port of Antwerp, to witness automated drone flights, and an autonomous depth gauging boat.

Visit Vice-Mayor Caluwaerts

Ms Erica Caluwaerts, Vice-Mayor for Innovation at the City of Antwerp, took an entire day to visit The Beacon. Aside from bilateral meetings with a number or residents, and a team experience at Strides, the Vice-Mayor and her team joined 15 community members for a lively lunch debate on the digital innovation opportunities in the City of Antwerp

IoT Bootcamp Graduation

The first batch of IoT Bootcamp participants graduated on February 3rd! Congratulations to Iristick, MyPitch, Toyfoo and ID Diamonds for attending the first edition of this five-day class!

The IoT Bootcamp is a flash course, entirely organized by members of our Community, to speed up the growth of your IoT project. It contains general masterclasses on how to set up a succesful IoT company and product, and technical courses on specific aspects such as wireless connectivity, sensors, data and security.

Innovation Briefing - Port of Antwerp

Piet Opstaele, Innovation Lead at the Port of Antwerp, took us for a dive into one of the largest ports in Europe, and the second largest chemical cluster in the world. Indeed, the Port of Antwerp is a lot more than just seagoing vessels coming in, and offloading their containers. The port is an economy, and one of the main employment and growth engines in our country.

In a fascinating presentation, Piet touched upon sustainability as a driver for innovation, the boundaries and restriction of automation projects, and the Port's immense innovation program that includes projects on 5G, drones, digital twins, asset monitoring and so much more.

Community Combo October - Soft Skills & Beer

Our monthly Community Combo events are an excellent way to get in touch with your co-Beaconeers. We try to present a fun, interactive and inspirational program that fits the expectations of all our members.

This time, Marc Beenders and Pieter Vandekerkhof gave us a masterclass in soft skills. How can human skills such as communication, a positive mindset, and productive feedback structures make you a better entrepreneur or leader? Marc and Pieter gave away some of the tips, based on the book they recently wrote.

Afterwards, UA professor and Aloxy co-founder Maarten Weyn took us for a journey in his beer brewing experience, and gave us a taste of his first batch of Weyn Beer.

Expert Review Antwerp App

The City of Antwerp is a front runner in terms of digitization. Before launching the public procurement procedure for the development of a native app for the City, the Chief Digital Officer organized an expert meeting to review and validate the blueprint. More than 50 front-end developers, UX specialists and other digital experts from our community and beyond, participated in this expert review.

In small groups, the experts gave feedback about specific parts of the blueprint, in order to enrich the knowledge and work of the CDO team.

AI, Data & Sustainability in the Smart Port

The second inspiration session of the COOCK Smart Port 2025 program was all about sustainability. Imec Ghent researcher Matthias Strobbe explained how AI can be used for load balancing and predictive maintenance, and Evelyn Heylen demonstrated how Centrica - as a smart energy services company - is applying these technologies to power supply and batteries. Bart Huybrechts finally, elaborated on the role of data in the innovation strategy of the flagship maritime company CMB.

Orange 5G Lab Inauguration

"2020 must be, and wíll be, the year of 5G for Flanders" said Minister Benjamin Dalle at the inauguration of the Orange 5GLab at The Beacon. The 5GLab is a tremendous asset, as it offers rare infrastructure for companies to test & certify their products and services. The inauguration lifted the veil of what the possibilities are ...

Entirely in the collaboration spirit of The Beacon, it was great to see that Orange invited some of their startup-partners such as Helicus , OTIV and Iristick to demonstrate their 5G project.

Innovation Briefing - City of Antwerp

Chief Digital Officer Youri Segers presented the digital strategy of the City of Antwerp to the members of our community.

Young Supply Chain Masters & Young Forward Belgium

A delegation of young entrepreneurs from the maritime and logistics industry visited The Beacon and were briefed about the R&D projects COOCK Smart Port 2025 and Physical Internet Living Lab. The importance of digital innovation was explained by community member Lanark.

Together we take it to the next level

Missed an event?

Missed an event?

Ten Miles Antwerp - Community Team

Data Governance with Azure Purview

InnoEnergy BIZ Bootcamp - Innovation Competition

Enter the Metaverse

Space @ The Beacon

Stay informed!

Community Evening - Wij, Robots

Visit Deputy Prime Minister Petra De Sutter

Visit Vice-Mayor Caluwaerts

IoT Bootcamp Graduation

Innovation Briefing - Port of Antwerp

Community Combo October - Soft Skills & Beer

Stay informed!

Expert Review Antwerp App

AI, Data & Sustainability in the Smart Port

Orange 5G Lab Inauguration

Innovation Briefing - City of Antwerp

Young Supply Chain Masters & Young Forward Belgium

Ten Miles Antwerp - Community Team

Data Governance with Azure Purview

InnoEnergy BIZ Bootcamp - Innovation Competition

Enter the Metaverse

Space @ The Beacon

Community Evening - Wij, Robots

Visit Deputy Prime Minister Petra De Sutter

Visit Vice-Mayor Caluwaerts

IoT Bootcamp Graduation

Innovation Briefing - Port of Antwerp

Community Combo October - Soft Skills & Beer

Expert Review Antwerp App

AI, Data & Sustainability in the Smart Port

Orange 5G Lab Inauguration

Innovation Briefing - City of Antwerp

Young Supply Chain Masters & Young Forward Belgium