NEOS — A Future-Oriented Home for Digital Innovation

The construction boom at the University of Bremen continues and perhaps the most exciting project is currently coming up behind NW1. In March 2022, the new NEOS complex will be inaugurated, housing the DIGITAL HUB Industry and the new headquarters of the IT service provider encoway. NEOS is also the future location of several university institutes, start-ups and an Open Innovation Lab, where SMEs and established industrial companies can experiment. This will be a "high-tech playground" according to our alumnus Christoph Ranze, who is the managing director of encoway. NEOS embodies a breathtaking success story that started a hundred metres away with three small offices.

The three rooms were housed in the Seekamp building as a spin-off of the University of Bremen. Founder Christoph Ranze specialises in CPQ software, which is used to design configuration processes for marketing complex industrial products. This is still the core business today, which has operated from the beginning under the umbrella of the Hamelin-based Lenze Group, a manufacturer of drive and automation technology and, with a turnover of more than 700 million euros, a typical "hidden champion" of the German SME sector. "We started 21 years ago with three people and are glad that we can now bring our 280 employees across three locations together again in one building at NEOS," says Ranze. encoway has always been close to the university, and not only spatially. A history of constant cooperation between science and business led to the establishment of the innovation lab DOCK.ONE a few years ago, which is now also located in NEOS. "We have grown so quickly not because we have the best technology (that’s good too),” says Mr Ranze, “but because we have access to the most important resource: the graduates of the University of Bremen and the City University of Applied Sciences. That’s what makes us strong: talented and ambitious people." The DIGITAL HUB Industry, supported and accompanied by the State of Bremen, is primarily intended to enable SMEs to digitise — to be a laboratory and test area for innovations and new business models. "Some of our customers have already secured a shared room near our labs," says Ranze. With such rapid growth, the question naturally arises as to how long NEOS will have enough room for newcomers. "We have 4,000 square metres of reserve space," says Ranze, "and we may start building an extension as early as this summer."