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Startup at Nordic Universities

Project 2024 Closed

The longer-term objective is to enable Nordic universities to offer best-in-class student startup services. This goal will be realized through a 2-3 year main project starting in Q3 2024. The achievement of this objective involves facilitating the openness, visibility, and attractiveness of complementary specialized startups and innovation ecosystems to students from other Nordic countries.

To get a good starting point for the journey this pre-project will seed the development of a network among student startup hubs and innovation centers at Nordic universities, in order to:

  • Develop a platform for organisational learning and development of university-ba.sed student-startups and innovation.
  • Enable universities for whom student-startups and innovation is a rather new area of activity to fast-track implementation of best practices by learning from other Nordic universities.
  • Finally, realising the above, scope a longer-term partnership and cooperation project that will enable Nordic Universities to develop complementary specialised startup and innovation ecosystems open to students from other Nordic countries.

Background

The project is initiated by UCPH Lighthouse as a result of network activities and follow up meetings between UCHP Lighthouse (University of Copenhagen), Helsinki Incubators (University of Helsinki) and Lyspæren (University of Stavanger). There are at least a number of other startup hubs in the Nordics.
This project will for the first time organize a structured, rather than infrequent ad hoc based exchanges, cooperation between Nordic university-led startup hubs. Both the pre-project and the main project will very directly impact on the offer to Nordic societies that universities offer for entrepreneurship, innovation and competitiveness in the Nordics.

Impact and objectives

To get a good starting point and broad Nordic network to develop complementary specialised startup and innovation ecosystems open to sudents from other Nordic countries, this pre-project will seed the develop a network among of student startup hubs and innovation centers at Nordic universities.

The pre-project objectives are to:

  • Provide a platform and a forum for organisational learning and development of university-based student startups and innovation.
  • Enable universities for whom student startup and innovation is a rather new area of activity, to fast-track implementation utilizing best practices by learning from other Nordic universities.
  • And realizing this - to ensure sustainability of project efforts and results - scope a longer-term partnership and cooperation project aimed at enabling Nordic Universities to develop complementary specialized startup and innovation ecosystems open to students from other Nordic countries.

Pre-project outcomes:

  • Overview of student startup hubs and innovation centers in the Nordics.
  • Forming a committed partnership/network (around 10 university startup hubs in 5 countries ).
  • Scoping the cooperation, partnership and roles going forward in the main project.

Target groups

The target group in the pre-project are other Nordic universities with similar innovation and startup hubs for student entrepreneurs as the three pre-project partners.
The pre-project will aim in mobilize around 10 such university-led startup hubs from the 5 Nordic countries.

Going forward

The pre-project will be led by UCPH Lighthouse - with Helsinki Incubators (University of Helsinki) and Lyspæren (University of Stavanger) as partners. As such UCPH Lighthouse is responsible for the overall project management. All three partners will contribute with meeting facilitation, including food-for-thought to agenda points.

Contacts