Jérôme Lutz (right) is a convinced biotech networker. Together with his team from UnternehmerTUM [x] he regularly organizes networking events for the tech scene (Image: private).
After completing his studies, he relocated to the start-up capital Berlin, where he worked in several start-ups and breathed in the entrepreneurial air of the city. However, after four years there, he still held on tight to his desire to create technical innovations with other tech enthusiasts. In 2015 he founded the online platform SynBio.Info, entering the biotechnology scene with it – an area for which he had been enthusiastic already during his schooldays.
The collective brain of the tech community
SynBio stands for synthetic biology – a relatively new discipline in biotechnology. For Lutz, synthetic biology is “the most amazing industry there is at the moment.” In this discipline, molecular biologists work together with software experts, mechanical engineers, chemists and designers. For example, this way DNA can be programmed, reconstructed in the laboratory and then inserted into an organism. A world without hunger, disease and energy problems is within reach,” says Lutz, not hiding his enthusiasm.
With the non-profit infrastructure of SynBio.Info, Lutz created a “collective brain”, as he calls it, which aims to stimulate exchange. Originally, it actually started up as a personal notebook, but he soon realized that this could become the ideal platform for exchanging ideas and learning from each other. Since then, SynBio has become a community and a community blog. More than 20 authors document and share the progress and discoveries taking place in the synthetic bio-scene.
The most exciting is the exchange with the community – it is extremly inspiring and together something new comes out of it all the time.
His aim of the tech community with the ideas from the synthetic biology community is one that Lutz pursues unabated – also outside of his own platform. As a passionate networker, he organizes monthly meetups, where enthusiasts and professionals exchange ideas and inspire one another. Typical of his generation, he believes firmly in achieving success through cooperation and in a collective setting. “Sharing instead of being a lone wolf” is the motto of Generation Y and the tech and hacking experts of the present.
This is also one of the reasons why Lutz returned to Munich and to UnternehmerTUM in 2016 where he founded the division [x] together with some like-minded persons. Under the motto „We bring science fiction to your doorstep“, the team organizes hackathons und prototype challenges. The [x] team connect (bio-)hackers, students, entrepreneurs and companies, who pair up as joint teams and create the technology of tomorrow.
His passion for synthetic biology makes him look with optimism to the future: “Who knows, maybe we will soon have reached a point where the idea of a limited life span will be a thing of the past – may it be via biological approaches, by uploading the brain in the cloud or living as a robot one day.”
Jérôme Lutz. (Image: private).
Diplom TUM-BWL, 2012
From Berlin and with French roots, he has elected to live and work in Munich. In 2007, he founded his start-up Newspread, a service TUM still uses today for its infoscreens. Eight years later, he set up an online platform dealing with the subject area synthetic biology. His enthusiasm for biotechnology and innovation ultimately brought him back to TUM, and since 2016 he has worked at UnternehmerTUM, the TUM center for innovation and business start-ups as Lead Synthetic Biology.
Jérôme Lutz loves networks and exchanging ideas, so in his free time his favorite pastime is organizing meetings and informal round tables.
