May 22, 2019

New collaborative work with Young Industrial Innovators

Optilift is the first company to do collaborative work with Young Industrial Innovators (YI2), a student-based consultancy services firm established around the Mechatronics Innovation Lab (MIL) at the University of Agder, Campus Grimstad.

The young consultancy firm was established earlier in 2019 with a goal to bring UiA-students valuable working life experiences, as well as offering local trade and industry the chance to utilise top line student knowledge from research institutions such as MIL.

Now, their first customer as a newly-established consultancy firm has been Optilift.

– Without revealing too much details, what I can say is that YI2 and two of their consultants have given us effective support regarding survey work with our Optilift sensor technology, Torbjørn Engedal, CTO in Optilift explains.

He is happy with the work the student consultants have delivered so far.

– When they approached us and offered us their services, we felt an urge to help them and to see what they could do for us. They have both done well, and we decided to extend the collaboration a bit further, as we had the chance to offer one of them a position as summer intern.

Motivated student consultants

Jakob Einarsønn Lunde (pictured above left), one of the YI2 consultants, says it has been valuable to get a taste of how real life problems can be solved.

– The collaboration with Optilift has been very refreshing and interesting. The difference from having an assignment given to you from a professor compared to actually solving a practical, real life case has been challenging, but very rewarding, he explains.

General manager at YI2, Fredrik Bringager (pictured above right), praises the fact that Optilift agreed to collaborate with YI2 in the first place.

– We decided to approach Torbjørn without any references, as they turned out to be our first proposed customer. The fact that they still agreed to collaborate with us has been of major importance lately, as this reference has sparked a lot of new activity for us, he explains.

Important R&D environments

Engedal also regards MIL and the Grimstad environment as important industrial research environments.

– In the future Optilift will need to recruit top line talent to be able to compete and further develop our products. This collaboration with YI2 can only strengthen such connections for us.

– On the other hand, it is also important for us to get a chance to give something back to the student environment, he adds.

Read more about Young Industrial Innovators here.