Chintan Shah
India
Chintan Shah studied Mechanical Engineering at Nirma University in India and worked as an engineer for Suzuki. In 2006, he came to Delft to study Management of Technology. With his concept for intelligent street lighting, he won the 2010 Campus Energy Challenge. In 2011 he successfully realised a pilot on the TU Delft campus. He now has his own company, Tvilight BV, to commercialise this solution, which resulted in tests with street lightening in several cities. "As an engineer you always try to solve problems. Whenever you encounter a problem you want to fix it; that is a characteristic of engineers. A bit like Sherlock Holmes, who continually tries to solve mysteries. An engineering education will gear your mind to problem solving. At MOT they taught me something in addition. I learned how to connect technology with commerce, how to make money while solving a technical problem. That sounds simple, but 90% of innovations fail, because engineers do not understand how to turn a technical idea into cash. The combination of engineering and business taught at MOT is very valuable. It makes students think about creating a strategy, about developing business models that are sustainable and long-term profitable”. "After completing my master’s degree I joined an oil and gas company, where I worked for the next five years. During the last two years, I spent my evenings and weekends developing the idea for my company. I had noticed that there is this huge waste of energy in developed countries: street lights are on from sunset to sunrise, irrespective of the amount of traffic or people on the street. I started to ponder on a solution and came up with what is now Tvilight: an intelligent street lighting solution”.