Connect Poland Prize: attracting foreign startup talents with corporates and investors
About this good practice
Connect Poland Prize is a currently implemented acceleration program (2021-2023) based on experience of pilot Poland Prize initiative supervised by Polish Agency of Enterprise Development. It sets a number of challenges to address, which are to:
• boost innovation level of the Polish economy
• boost open innovation culture in Polish public and private sector
• strengthen Polish startup ecosystem through transferring innovative ideas, business culture and talent from abroad, and
The problems addressed:
• insufficient integration of foreign startups with Polish ecosystem
• low utilization of innovation potential by R&D centers, corporates and innovative SMEs
• funding and networking gap in some European and global regions with low innovation potential
• supply-demand imbalances in developed and highly innovative regions, creating opportunities to create low competition niches in Polish economy
Activities
The program:
• connects innovative human capital coming from foreign countries with the ecosystem in Poland – corporates and SMEs with high demand for innovations, seed/VC funds, as well as other partners and the community of specialists, whose potential will increase the chance for success of the startups participating in the program
• provides grant support up to 65K EUR (soft-landing, development, acceleration and post-acceleration) for pilot validation of the startup technlogy on the market or to improve its investment readiness
Resources needed
Project value: ca. 2.3 million EUR:
• 23% staff & administrative costs
• 77% equity-free grants for 56 startups - max. 65K EUR / startup (soft-landing, development and acceleration)
HR:
• program and office management (2x), finance (1x), marketing (1x), startup scouts (3x) and others
Evidence of success
So far, there interim evidence of success is based on 2 calls for applications:
• 155 applications combined under first 2 calls
• Applications from Europe and Asia (Ukraine, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Denmark, Hungary, Czech Republic, Croatia, Italy, Great Britain, Bosnia & Hertzegovina, Georgia, Moldova, Turkey, India, China, Israel, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Zimbabwe and others)
• 23 startups selected for the first 2 batches
Potential for learning or transfer
Connect Poland Prize acceleration program and particularly its elements could be easily transfered to other regions. It can definitely be interesting for European regions with different innovation development level, which are looking to boost their startup ecosystem and internal seed/VC market, especially with low level of internationalisation of startup community.
As a whole, this good practice can be easily transfered due to:
• mechanisms effectively connecting foreign talents with domestic ecosystem (e.g. through soft-landing program preceeding the very typical acceleration activities, and post-acceleration support to magnify results and address specific issues startup can face in the country it is new to)
• tailor-made program framework - startups themselves have an ultimate impact on how to cooperate with chosen business partner
• opportunity for startups to boost early traction / get first clients and extend its business network