Prof. Dr. Susana Sargento - Winner of the EU Women Innovators Prize 2016 - Main contents

I am very happy that Prof. Dr. Susana Sargento, Co-Founder of a tech company and winner of the EU Women Innovators Prize 2016 accepted to write a blog post for my website. She turns vehicles into Wi-Fi hotspots and builds city-scale vehicular networks that collect terabytes of urban data. Her career can be an inspiration for other woman in Science and Tech.

It all started with the will to know more and more, always going further and working on different, evolving areas. This is why I became a researcher. The path to entrepreneurship started with our successful research: we were able to build something unique in the world.

However, our success was not foreseeable from the beginning. When we started the connected-vehicles- project, we had some delays due to unavailability at a reasonable cost of a Car-to-Car communication equipment. Since this fell under my responsibility, I had to come up with a solution. With the help of a number of excellent students, we were able to develop the technology ourselves, and integrate it, from the very beginning, with legacy technologies such as WiFi and Cellular. The result was our first demo, back in 2011. We have shown how one vehicle can send a video to another one driving behind, in order to see the road and the vehicles ahead. In the next phase, we got to the decisive stage: we made it possible to build a vehicular network in a city and decided to found Veniam, the company that commercializes our vehicular technology and network communication.

What now seems like a logical step was not at all so straightforward. Going from an idea to a prototype, to a finished commercialised product was a long journey. The path from researcher to an entrepreneur requires a complete change of mind set: the research and product are important, but so are the completely different challenges such as business models, management, marketing as well as securing investment.

During of the process, I think we made several good decisions:

We partnered from the beginning with US experienced business people (Robin Chase and Roy Russel);

We reached out from the beginning to business angels and venture capitalists to expand our company;

We submitted applications to many business contests and got positive results in most of them: winners of MIT Building Global Innovators, Gardner cool vendor list for smart cities, Wireless Broadband Alliance telecom operators and internet service providers - scale-up award, Red herring among the most innovation companies, Fierce wireless - 15 top wireless companies, Cable Labs - invited us to be on the main stage and voted Veniam the best new product most likely to succeed.

It was great and inspiring to see how our work changed the communication and life in the cities, parks and on the roads. This is why, when I am asked about the next step, I think about what would be the next solution and innovation that would improve people’s life. If before I was very committed to research, now I can only think about research if I can see a path towards its real deployment and testing by real users.

Participating in the EU Prize for Women Innovation Competition also gave me the boost I needed to move forward and continue on this path: thinking about the next innovation step - this is how I see my work moving forward and inspiring others.

Bio

Dr Susana Sargento is an Associate Professor with Habilitation at the University of Aveiro, Portugal and the Institute of Telecommunications, where she is leading the Network Architectures and Protocols group. She co-founded a vehicular networking company, Veniam, a spin-off of the Universities of Aveiro, Porto and Instituto de Telecomunicações, which builds a seamless low-cost vehicle-based internet infrastructure. Dr. Sargento has also undertaken the roles of Vice-President of Engineering and Head of Corporate Research.

On 10 March she was awarded the EU Women Innovators Prize 2016 for outstanding women entrepreneurs who bring their breakthrough ideas to the market.