Business festival sTARTUp brings together the biggest names in the Nordic-Baltic start-up world

Monday, 14 January 2019

The sTARTUp business festival in Tartu 23-25 January 2019 (www.startupday.ee) brings together over 100 world-class speakers and 4000 attendees to discuss business, innovation and new technologies, share startup success stories and lessons learned. The two-days stage program is complemented with several pitching competitions, hands-on seminars with professionals and a large expo area where companies showcase their latest innovations.

Part of sTARTUp festival, Science to Business - Nordic Dimension will be organised in collaboration between the University of Tartu; Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation; Tartu Science Park; University of Turku; Uppsala University Holding Company; NGO sTARTUp Day, and in cooperation with the Nordic Council of Ministers’ Office in Estonia.

sTARTUp gives a possibility for matchmaking to connect startups with investors, find future business partners and encourage startup-corporate collaboration. Additionally, numerous parties and networking events take place during the festival.

The main goal of the sTARTUp days is to inspire the establishment and to support the early phase growth of innovative academical startups/spin offs and projects within all partner universities in their efforts to commercialize know-how and scientific developments created in universities and in later stages to scale-up born spin-off companies and help them to reach internationals markets. One of the long-term goals of the partnership is to support the cooperation between Nordic and Baltic universities, more accurately with their commercialization and tech-transfer support structures to increase number of science-based growth companies and to ensure their high survival rate.

Technology and business worlds are developing faster than ever before. Future trends both in business and education are moving toward platforms and collaborative environments. Another emerging trend is peer-to-peer economy (P2P) which also is breaking into education landscape.
The short-term benefit of this cooperation is the gained know-how of modern business and technology world for the attending universities and spin-offs. Access to investors is another valuable component for participating spin-offs. The main long-term benefit is the development of a collaborative platform/environment between universities in Tartu, Turku and Uppsala which could lead to shared know-how and resources and via that to increased capacity of the Nordic-Baltic region.

The festival aims at promoting the development of the networks of the universities of the region to become a strong joint partner to businesses and the public sector in the region, developing entrepreneurial university, contributing to the cooperation of universities with businesses and increasing role of knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship in the development of the economy and welfare of society of the Nordic-Baltic region.

Main activities of sTARTUp Day 2019 business festival in Tartu, Estonia are:
1. Panel Science to Business, 25th January 2019;
2. Seminars and workshops, 24-25th January 2019;
3. EST - FIN - SWE Friendly spin-off pitching competition, 25th January 2019;
4. Demo area for university spin-offs, 24-25th January 2019.


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