Farhan Farrukh

EIT – InnoEnergy's Energy for Smart Cities program

In 2017, Farhan Farrukh enrolled in the EIT – InnoEnergy's Energy for Smart Cities program and traveled to Belgium to pursue his first Master's degree in Energy Engineering at KU Leuven. There, he was introduced to CommUnity by EIT InnoEnergy, through which he learned about the other EIT communities, and started the job as CommUnity manager during his second year at Grenoble-INP, organizing various activities with the local team.

During the following two years, throughout Europe, he attended numerous workshops, competitions, tested one startup, and engaged in a variety of other activities. This allowed him to build a large professional network of Energy experts and learn a variety of skills not covered in the academic program. He highly recommends the program for everyone who wants to work hard and succeed in the field of renewable energy.

He believes that any sustainable energy initiative in which he had been involved in the past four years is an accomplishment for him, especially the failure of his first crowd funding Renewable Energy technology startup. He was able to gain firsthand knowledge of what not to do when starting a new business, product, or service.

His current position at Smart Innovation Norway has provided him with numerous possibilities to be directly involved in some of Europe's most innovative initiatives. During the pandemic time together with another EIT-InnoEnergy alumni fellow, he was engaged in the creation of his second startup called ChargeBnB, enabling private charger sharing in cities can be termed as another achievement of the recent time that still needs a lot of work, but it will be definitely exciting times ahead. Hence, he is very fortunate to utilize the EIT eco-system to its best value.

“It has been wonderful experience so far and look forward to creating more sustainable solutions together with EIT Alumni. The pandemic has definitely put on hold on EIT Alumni community to meet each other in person but it has certainly not stopped us from the mission of developing solutions that actually help us save the planet”