Enter Espoo brought international corporations together with over a hundred startups digitally during Corporate-Startup Online Weeks. Enter Espoo organised the new online matchmaking activity in May-October 2020 to help Espoo-based and Finnish companies to find customers, investors, and partners during the COVID-19 situation.
When the Coronavirus outbreak started in Finland in the spring of 2020, Enter Espoo pulled the plug on the annual physical Corporate-Startup Event scheduled for the summer. The company quickly replaced the physical matchmaking event with its virtual version, Corporate-Startup Online Weeks.
During Online Weeks, that ran from May to October, Enter Espoo matched 15 corporations with over a hundred Espoo-based and Finnish startups and scaleups in pre-selected, one-to-one online meetings.
"From the selection of interesting, fitting and innovative startups to the organisation of several one-to-one meetings, it has been a pleasure to work with such a professional and flexible team," says Dirk Ploss, Head of Digital Technologies Scouting and Advisory, Beiersdorf.
As a result of the meetings, Enter Espoo has already confirmed five cases where corporations and startups have agreed to explore new business partnerships or have signed investments. New collaboration cases are expected to be finalised soon as many participants have continued discussion after the activity.
"Corporate-Startup Online Weeks was a very fruitful event for a Japanese corporation. Enter Espoo made is easy to reach Finnish startup companies, which is generally difficult," says Masami Sumiyoshi, Manager, Hitachi Vantara (UK).
As always, Enter Espoo organised the matchmaking activity together with local partners — this time with Aalto Startup Center, A Grid startup community, Innovation Home, and VTT Launchpad.
The corporations that took part in Online Weeks 2020 were: Almirall (Spain), Bayer Nordics, Beiersdorf (Germany), Mercedes-Benz (Germany), CapitaLand (Singapore), GoHub (Spain), Hitachi Ventures/Hitachi Vantara (Japan and Europe), Infosys (India), Marubeni (Japan), ST Engineering (Singapore), Sodexo Nordics, Telefonica (Spain), Telia (Sweden and Finland), Volkswagen (Germany), and 3M (USA).
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