“The new normal” has proven that flexibility and innovation are two of the key aspects for companies to successfully face the changes brought by the new context. Europe, aware of the need to push the sector towards more disruptive strategies, is reinforcing the innovative ecosystem with initiatives such as Scale-up Champions online incubation program, enabling startup-corporate collaboration.
The participating deep-tech startups propose solutions to the challenges identified in industries of several sectors: financial, medical technology, green energy, smart cities and industry 4.0. In this sense, Scale-up Champions invites to join companies that are open to redefine their operating models and want to break with the classic models, exploring solutions that startups already have integrated.
The cooperation between large corporations and emerging companies, using startups' innovative solutions, helps the companies to diversify their business models and stimulates corporations’ development.
Several Spanish startups, operating in La Salle-URL and La Salle Technova innovation community, share their success stories thanks to the companies and startups collaboration. One of them, Mayordomo Smart Points, a startup that has participated in eDelivery and BMP, two of La Salle Technova's accelerators, and has developed perspective activities with consolidated companies such as Mango, Viena and JLL. This relationship helped both parties to guide and improve their services, adapting them to the needs of the market.
Mayordomo, has signed collaboration agreements with CBRE and the Consorci de la Zona Franca de Barcelona to install smart lockers in their facilities. "Participating in the programs of La Salle Technova in our beginnings has helped us to get experience and grow as a company. Over the years we have managed to achieve goals, positioning ourselves as leaders in intelligent services at a European level and setting our sights on new markets, such as New York and Hong Kong," explain the managers of Mayordomo Smart Points.
For Mario Serrano, director of the CZFB Urban Development Department, the Mayordomo case is one more example of the focus that the Consorci has on technology startups “that can add value to our business and our clients and at the same time feed us with ideas and the needs of a market that is very changing and dynamic today”.
Serrano highlights that with the BMP and eDelivery incubators, and in its role as Barcelona's economic and social engine, the Consorci “works to generate an ecosystem capable of energizing and promoting strategies for the new 4.0 economy with local and international impact and that respond to new challenges and opportunities”.
Francisco Sensat, director of the Real Estate Department and Free Trade Zone of the Consorci, comments that “working together with technology startups allows us to be connected to new trends and opportunities in the market and link the most innovative proposals with main sectors of economic activity”.
Companies wishing to participate in the program should contact the coordinators and submit their challenges and needs, or directly through the website www.scaleupchampions.com. The international experts of Scale-Up Champions will identify and select a group of emerging companies that have demonstrated their ability to solve challenges in different sectors, and together with the corporations will select those that best respond to the approaches described. Subsequently, after a virtual workshop, each of the corporations will choose the startups they consider most suitable to continue working with them.
The application for the corporates: https://www.scaleupchampions.com/for-corporates
ScaleUp Champions is a European initiative, financed by the European Commission within the framework of the Horizon 2020 program, which aims to connect diverse ecosystems of deep technology startups and generate transnational work dynamics to standardize European growth paths. In addition to La Salle-URL and La Salle Technova, four science parks and university centers in Estonia, Denmark, Lithuania and Poland are part of the project.