#6 Luuk Eliens - Partner and CCO of XNode

Luuk Eliens is Partner and Chief Commercial Officer of XNode, the leading Chinese platform for global innovation with offices in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Singapore. XNode is on a mission to build a global platform for innovation connecting China to the rest of the world by empowering innovators and entrepreneurs to build businesses with global impact. To realize it’s mission, XNode consists of five business units: (1) XNode Community – a physical space where innovators can connect, (2) XNode Innovation service – where XNode works together with its corporate partners to realize innovation through consultancy, accelerators and training services, (3) XNode Launch China – where XNode supports startups and scaleups to grow, (4) XNode Venture Building – where XNode takes equity stakes in selected companies and (5) XNode Labs – where moonshot projects are explored.

Luuk is definitely a pioneer with regard to bringing professional startup activities to China - he is heading the venturing activities of HightechXL there since 2017 - and meanwhile extended his activities to Singapore by co-initiating the Singapore Deep Tech Alliance. As an entrepreneur and investor himself, he does understand what it takes to build a startup and at the same time is a thought leader in the field of deep tech venturing, its specific challenges and approaches to enable it.

In this episode, we take a closer look at the Chinese startup landscape and what makes venture building so hard in this ecosystem. Luuk also explains the idea behind the Singapore Deep Tech Alliance and how exactly venture building is being done there. We also discuss the main challenges of deep tech venturing, why methods such as the Lean Startup possess a limited value for this type of innovation and Luuk proposes a radical approach for changing thew rules of tech transfer in order to pave the way for more startups in collaboration with research organizations.