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Building bridges between start-ups and big companies – activities within Krakow Living Lab

Acceleration Programme organized by Kraków Technology Park

 

The industry is ready to implement innovations

In Poland, there is need of highly innovative solutions for industry and start-ups are capable to take that role. However, the Industry 4.0 and smart city market with hard entry-level and risk. The solution to this problem was the KPT ScaleUp. It was a residential 13-week acceleration programme for small companies working on innovation for industry and smart city.

 

The main focus of the programme was to support start-ups that have reached at least a prototype of a B2B product with know-how, mentoring, sales and marketing advisory. In order to verify and adjust their products to market demands and client expectations.

 

The project itself focused on the Living Labs collaborative and holistic methodology both to engage multiple perspectives and initiate true collaboration between different stakeholders: 23 small companies, 13 industry partners, R&D, design specialists, more than 20 mentors and the end users of the products. Beginning with quick contextual and ethnographic research
upon the needs and expectations towards the service, dynamic prototyping of next
ideas and valuable evaluation of the upcoming product versions both with the
clients and the end users.

 

In early March, the Demo Day closing the 2nd edition of the KPT ScaleUp program took place in the Krakow Technology Park. The event dedicated to innovations in industry and smart city gathered over 160 guests.

 

Twelve startups presented their solutions after 3 months of work. Among them, there were teams that create, among others autonomous hangars for drones, machines for processing window profiles, intelligent lighting, and even “allegro for industrial waste”.

 

Creating innovations in the area of industry is obviously more difficult than designing another application for smartphones, but in turn, there are definitely more chances for business success. Large enterprises appreciate the innovative solutions proposed by startups and are ready to pay for them.  The creation of the acceleration program together with the Krakow Technology Park involved 13 large companies, including Kraków Airport, EC Grupa, ASTOR, Budimex, ES-SYSTEM, Fideltronik, Oknoplast, Protech, Radionika, Supersnow, Siemens, Syntaj and Woodward.

Access to experienced companies, their help and the ability to conduct tests in their facilities was definitely something the most valuable.

 

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