- by Cindy Ranchon
- June 7, 2022
Connect to innovate!
The Singapore Economic Development Board wanted to engage Singapore-based MNCs with innovative startups from the European market through an online forum, to generate collaboration opportunities between Singapore-based multinational companies and Europeans startups, a lesser familiar market for the Asian players. To support them in this initiative, EDB decided to hire a consortium of 3 complementary companies: Actavia, Co-Creation Lab and Pufferfish Partners to design and run the forum.
Attract european startups to Singapore
While EDB sourced and made the first introductions between the consortium and the MNCs, here is what Co-creation Lab actually delivered for the project :
> Together with Actavia and Pufferfish Partners, we worked with the innovation and investment leads of 20 MNCs to help them identify challenges and formulate problem statements for startups to understand their context and propose innovative solutions.
> We designed the web platform dedicated to the project, to engage with the startups and enable MNCs to assess them: www.innovationforum.sg
> Together with our partners, we sourced and pre-screened 200 startups from Europe keen to expand in Asia, selected the 124 relevant ones and helped the corporates to collectively cut that list down to 50, and organised them around 8 verticals.
> We prepared the MNCs and the startups for the pitch day, coaching each side to understand each other, for the startups to present adequately and for the MNCs to assess the startups efficiently.
> We organised and facilitated the Demo Day and the following intros between the interested participants.
Results of the innovation partnership forum
The forum gathered more than 200 startups from all over Europe, spread across various sectors : FinTech, Smart Cities, Sustainability, Industry 4.0, Digital Healthcare, Agri & Food Tech, RetailTech & eCommerce, Marine Tech & Real Estate.
Singapore-based MNCs went through the selection process to collectively pick the 50 finalist startups, selected for their uniqueness, innovative aspect of the solution, new technology relevant to their problem and the potential value to be added to their organisations and to Singapore.
At the end of the pitch sessions, 100 requests of introductions were formulated by 16 companies to 42 startups to explore potential collaborations, reaching our goal to connect the different participants through tangible business opportunities.
