From Shelves to Impact: How TU Delft is turning shelved projects into open hardware stars
May 30, 2025 @ 2:30 PM - 2:50 PM GMT+1 Add to Calendar
Each year, TU Delft’s patent office processes about 100 applications, with only five leading to long-term patents. This leaves 95 innovative projects—often groundbreaking prototypes—gathering dust. Committed to open science, TU Delft is working to change this by creating open hardware resources that encourage broader knowledge sharing. One example is the Schistoscope, a smart, low-cost microscope designed for low-resource settings. Thoroughly documented as open hardware, it allows researchers to adapt and build upon it while offering a framework for documenting their own projects. This talk explores the challenges and successes in fostering an open hardware ecosystem within academia and demonstrates how open science and hardware can unlock the untapped potential of university innovations.
Jerry de Vos & Santosh Ilamparuthi
We are part of Delft Open Hardware, an initiative to strengthen the open hardware movement in and around the Technical University of Delft.