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Connecting 16 CVN ecosystems successfully

Last week we successfully connected 16 ecosystems within CVN, resulting in more than 30 1-to-1 sessions between corporates and SME’s/startups around the theme ‘Health(care) and Life Science. Many of them will also have a follow-up meeting.

 

The three CVN regional ecosystem partners (LIOF, BOM and OostNL) together with TNO, IMEC iStart, Brightlands Maastricht Health Campus, NLC Health and RWTH provided unique access to the innovations and technologies/services of 42 SMEs/startups in their portfolios that were relevant to the specific and latent challenges of 6 CVN corporates (Achmea, ASML, FUJIFILM, Medtronic, Philips and Unilever). The SMEs/startups can on their part benefit from the facilities, know-how, competencies and ecosystem of the corporates to boost their innovations. More than 50% of the SME’s/startups were invited to have a 1-to-1 conversation with the corporates and over 20% of them had a conversation with more than one corporate. The regional ecosystem partners are committed to further support “their” startups/SMEs with collaborations with the corporates.

 

To facilitate the information flow between the startups/SMEs and the corporates to prepare for the meeting, we used an innovative collaboration platform: Klever. Klever provides startups/SMEs a better way to tell their story and convey your proposition to the corporates and provides corporates a good insight into the capabilities of the startups/SMEs. The platform also enables corporates to involve relevant decision-makers internally and externally to optimize their decisions. (youtube about the event and Klever: click here; opening slides are on the CVN member page).

 

This event is not an isolated activity. As CVN, we are investigating how we can increase our ability to connect our members and partners’ ecosystems and foster collaboration, thereby creating more value for our members. How can we make better use of the wisdom of the CVN cloud, e.g., by using data-driven solutions such as the Klever platform?

 

What are the next steps? We are planning to have interviews with both the CVN members involved in the event of July 14th as well as several other CVN members that have expressed their interest in a similar event around the theme energy transition. Based on this input, we will prepare a plan that will be presented to the CVN members in a meeting in September (date to be set). More than ten years ago, we started as a platform for sharing good/bad practices. The next step has been to become an association of Corporate Venturing professionals (e.g. by creating the Corporate Venturing & Entrepreneurship Community and conducting research). We think that the next step in our CVN journey is collaboration and co-creating between ecosystems.