What happened during our first year of Urban Impact (Recap)
A year has passed since we celebrated Urban Impact’s launch. Time to take stock of the last 12 months, highlighting some of the things that we did.
At Urban Impact we divide our work into three fields: academy (thought leadership), launchpad (work with startups), and studio (ecosystem programs and innovation formats). Let’s look at what happened in each of them!
Academy
One of our goals is to support the nascent urban tech ecosystem with knowledge and valuable content. So here we compiled some of the keynotes and panels for you to watch where we participated over the last year:
City Nation Place Global Conference — “Why Smart City Brands Fail (and Thrive)”
Circular Cities Start-up Program — “Connecting Start-ups with Cities”
Seedstars Summit CEE — “Disrupting Cities”
TXL Urban Tech Republic Annual Conference — “Importance of urban tech startups for Berlin” (German)
PowerUP 2020 Grand Final — EIT InnoEnergy startup award
Creative Bureaucracy Festival — “Fixing the Internet & Harnessing Collective Intelligence: A Smarter Future for Cities”
We like to share our knowledge through content, one of which is our Urban Tech Startup Landscapes. We started in early 2020 by mapping Berlin’s Urban Tech Ecosystem, creating a social media wave we didn’t expect. Following that we brought together different stakeholders of the ecosystem in Berlin for the Urban Tech Startup and City Lunch hosted by Berlin city hall’s CityLAB, which we are partnering with.
Together with great partners, we then did a similar ecosystem mapping for a second landscape of the Polish Urban Tech Scene. We received a lot of positive feedback on both publications and it seems that landscapes are a useful tool, so we will keep at it covering many other startup hotspots and markets in Europe and beyond!
Another highlight was AsiaBerlin Summit where we curated a day-long conference bringing inspiring speakers from startups, VCs, businesses, and city officials from Europe and Asia together. You can re-watch the recorded live stream of the day here.
We also launched City Rebels, our podcast to feature thinkers and doers on a journey to shape the future of tomorrow. Our first pilot episode featured urban mobility guru and futurologist Anthony Townsend, which you can listen to here.
Launchpad
Something we haven’t very much communicated so far is our day-to-day work with urban tech startups. In 2020 we dived deep into urban use cases and go-to-market strategies for exciting startups working on topics ranging from urban lighting software to self-sovereign identity, air quality monitoring, crowdfunding energy co-ops and micro-mobility charging infrastructure!
We also launched our first own startup spin-off: CityOpps, a platform that helps urban tech companies find innovative procurement opportunities in cities across the world. Together with our partner Teonite we developed it as part of a venture building model We spoke in detail about it in Szczecin at the CityOpps Lunch Insight Session with Teonite.
Studio
In October last year, we hosted Germany’s biggest offline climate hackathon at the newly opened Futurium, Germany’s new house of the future. Together with 20 partners and supported by Europe’s largest climate innovation initiative, Climate-KIC, Climathon set a standard of its own, developing urban solutions to fight the climate crisis within 24 hours.
With the spread of Covid-19 and the lockdown in Germany, we joined forces alongside seven of Germany’s most important civil society initiatives - promoting digital transformation and social entrepreneurship - and organized the #WirVsVirus Hackathon. The outcome: more than 40.000 (!!!) online participants developing solutions to tackle various challenges caused by the global pandemic over a weekend. The hackathon was the largest the world has ever seen - and was prepared in just 5 days!
Out of 1.500 solutions developed, we accelerated 10 of the most promising ones as part of the WirVsVirus Solution Builder over the Summer, which we ran together with Impact Hub Berlin. You can watch the demo day and those solutions here.
Upward and onward!
This first year of Urban Impact has been a truly amazing journey. Starting a business shortly before the break out of the global pandemic was and still is an adventure that made us more resilient.
Over the course of the last 12 months, we met many outstanding people who spend their time to really make a meaningful difference to the planet and our society. From them, we learn new things every day. They challenge our thinking, break cliches, and inspire us.
To all of you dear urban tech entrepreneurs, impact investors, social innovators, public sector rebels, dreamers, and doers: Thank you!
With you at our side, we got stronger and are ready to take the journey to the next level. And if you want to join our journey or do something together, simply reach out to us: hello@urbanimpact.eu
