Outside good – at home best. The old motto still applies to most people, but not necessarily to the mission to gain new inspiration, share knowledge and build networks. This was confirmed by a group of university employees in April after a four-day excursion to Barcelona, which included visits to startup environments and participation in the EU Startup Summit hosted by Venture Cup Denmark.
Venture Cup Denmark is a member organisation for seven of the country’s universities and aims to promote the development of startups at universities by offering students participation in networks, startup competitions and mentoring, all designed to support the progress of innovative business ideas.
But especially since December, Venture Cup Denmark has also focused on the group of academic employees who work with entrepreneurship across a broad field in the universities’ entrepreneurial environments. In the last month of the year, the seven member universities of Venture Cup Denmark established the new network Danish University Entrepreneurship Network (DUEN), which aims to host networking activities for the employee group. The trip to Barcelona, supported by the Otto Mønsted Foundation, was the first example of this.
“Over time, all universities have their own hubs and their own programmes, but we also see a great need among universities for closer collaboration. There are very few universities in Denmark and Denmark is a very small country, so it doesn’t make much sense to compete with each other. We need to be much better at collaborating and sharing knowledge, and Venture Cup Denmark has put more focus on this,” says Business Developer Hjalti H. Jónsson.
The intensive days of inspiring visits and getting to know each other professionally and personally brought the participants closer together. These relationships make it easier to reach out to each other afterwards in their daily work across the universities. According to Hjalti H. Jónsson, this seems to be the benefit for a large part of the group.
The network and knowledge sharing counts
Pascal Gyldenberg, Business Developer at SDU RIO and SDU Startup Station, was one of the participants in Barcelona and here he was also confirmed that universities need to think bigger and draw on each other’s experience in the new network.
“During our conversations, we realised that we each have very similar programmes, concepts and even events. This shows that we are sitting at home and spending a lot of time and energy creating something new that someone else within a 300 km radius has already done. Instead of universities seeing each other as competitors, we should rather have a shared vision of putting Denmark on the world map as one of the best countries for university startups.”
The programme for the trip also dedicated a full day to attending the EU Startup Summit and again it was demonstrated that more ears and heads add positive synergy. This was an experience that Jakub Rubinowski, a business developer at the University of Copenhagen, took home with him:
“The Summit offered some really interesting presentations, and with the presentations fresh in our minds, we met afterwards in the group with the others who had attended the same thing. And the funny thing is that we all took away something different from the same presentation. By sharing different perceptions of exactly the same thing, we can create more value.”
The EU Startup Summit should offer a lot of exciting presentations for the participants.
Competitors again – and then not
A few months after returning from Barcelona, several of the participants from the DUEN network were looking forward to meeting again.
Venture Cup Denmark hosted the annual National Startup Competition on 21 June and this year invited DUEN members to workshops and networking events before the startup competition kicked off at Ingeniørforeningen in Copenhagen.
“There will be a large group of participants and I think all university hubs are represented. But they’ll also be there later, when the National Startup Competition kicks off, and they’ll be competing against each other instead of the collaboration that we otherwise emphasise. Here, employees cheer on the teams from their own hubs, but there are also some startups that, for example, originate from SDU and are now in a programme at Copenhagen School of Entrepreneurship or in Skylab at DTU. That’s how it is with some startups – even though they may be competing against each other, there may be two or three universities that have a sense of ownership of the same team.”
Briefly about
Venture Cup Denmark was founded in 2000 and was the first organiser of the National Startup Competition in 2003. In 2015, the organisation founded the University Startup World Cup. Both competitions give universities’ best startups the opportunity to compete against each other in innovative ideas and allow participants to build a network among different types of startups and national borders.
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