Movers & Shakers Summit 2018 — hosted by Startup SAFARI & PIRATE

“It’s all about awareness”

On July 3rd, right before PIRATE Summit, we brought together 80 ecosystem builders from all over the world for the second edition of the Movers & Shakers Summit in Cologne. Once again it was all about networking, discussions and exchange.

What is Movers & Shakers Summit?

Since we have been helping to build startup ecosystems and communities with PIRATE.global for more than eight years now and since 2017 with Startup SAFARI, the idea of the Movers & Shakers Summit is to bring the community builders of the different ecosystems all over the globe together and create an environment for fruitful exchange, lively discussions, massive learning and a lot of networking.

The key findings from this year’s edition are that

• we need to establish trust within our networks — locally and globally
• we need to keep on working to raise awareness for startups as an important player within the economy
• we need to build bridges between the different stakeholders within ecosystems as well as in the global network

Raising awareness is the key challenge for big and small startup ecosystems.

What happens when you bring together ecosystem builders from over 34 countries? Plenty of discussions! Oh boy, did we have great discussions — and a lot of fun. We sat together on eight different discussion tables talking about the challenges we are facing in our ecosystems — and what we can do about it. The topics of the discussion tables went from general startup ecosystem building, how to build trust within relations in ecosystems, over to how to use Startup SAFARI as a tool for ecosystem building.

Although the challenges varigate throughout the stages and sizes of different ecosystems it became clear, that we have to face similar obstacles.

One — if not the most challenging task in building startup ecosystems is the establishment of entrepreneurship as a relevant part in a local ecosystem. No matter all the unicorns out there, for a lot of people startups are still something they either don’t understand or don’t take serious when it comes to making business.

Therefore it’s the key task for ecosystem builders to educate all stakeholders in their ecosystem about the relevance of entrepreneurship. The stakeholders are not only the founders, the startups and the investors, but also the corporates, universities and the government. Or as Ieva Upniece (Community Manager at TechChill and Startup SAFARI Riga Chapter Lead) puts it: “I want that any child and grandma knows what we do in the startup scene and that it is as normal as working in a bank or in a school.”

So how do we get these people, especially those who are not in contact with the startup spirit on a daily basis (yet), on board the entrepreneur-ship?

Right now, every ecosystem is reinventing the wheel from scratch. Of course, every ecosystem is individual and has it’s own needs — but that does not mean that we cannot learn from each other. Let’s start to work together and build on top of each other instead of putting brick by brick next to each other.

Establishing trust by identifying the “why”

In the discussions, we came up with a lot of ideas how to make that happen. To start with, Ton van’t Noordende (CEO at 01 Ventures) and Madelynn Martiniere (Zebra Unite, Promise Hub) presented the ideas that came up in their discussion about trust as a cornerstone of strong relations. “We’re living in a world right now where digitalization is imminent, but it is extremely tough for people to meet the right people.” says Ton, especially when you are not (yet) part of a community like the PIRATE network. And it becomes even harder in those ecosystems, where identity is not about where you come from anymore, but the line of what makes an identity and what makes a community is shifting. When it comes to building trust in these ecosystems, but also in any other, it comes down to one question: why?

“Why are we in this, why are we having this conversations about ecosystems, why are we building these communities in the first place?”, asks Ton. In identifying our why, our motivation for what we do, we identify our role in the ecosystem.

Building bridges by creating meaningful connections

Our lowest common denominator is that we all want to empower the entrepreneurs, because we believe that startups play a crucial role when it comes to healthy societies. To establish that image, we need to identify the stakeholders playing an active role in the ecosystem right now and the ones, which aren’t on board yet, but should be soon enough. In a perfect world, that means every single member in a society: from child to student to employee to founder to manager to grandma.

We want to create touch points between these different stakeholders, the active ones as well as the ones to be. We can do so in many ways: host events, share our stories of success and failure, spread the word of what we do and why we do it, share the learnings from our mistakes, so others can build up on that. That way, we can raise awareness of the startup scene itself. As we experienced at Movers & Shakers Summit, nothing is more powerful than connecting face to face with each other. So let’s encourage the stakeholders to encounter each other on an eye to eye level.

Connect, share, learn

To bring it all together: We want to share. We want to exchange, we want to learn from each other’s mistakes, we want to learn from each others success. Even though some of us are competitors, we don’t want to work against each other, but want to help each other to be successful. How exactly that exchange will happen is still to be decided on, but we feel like this year’s Movers & Shakers Summit was a start for much more fruitful exchange, ideas and creativity to come.

We want to thank all you great people participating in this year’s Movers and Shakers Summit. Thank you for your openness, the honest discussions, the most awesome buzzword bingo (“Blocky the Blockchain”, “Unchain the Blockchain”, “Block the Chain” — just to name a few) and all the fun we had! You are truly inspiring and we, the Startup SAFARI team, are incredibly happy to work with peeps like you.

What do you think of this? Leave a comment and let’s discuss your ideas. If you want support your ecosystem by bringing Startup SAFARI to your city and connect all stakeholders all together, join our SAFARI community!