Tehnopol Science and Business Park, Estonia
“Innovation Leaders Club”
A community fostering collaboration between corporate innovators and startups to drive innovation. With nearly 80 members, ILC enhances R&D investment and product development, promoting systematic innovation and open innovation strategies through meetups, matchmaking, workshops, and collaborative tools
Purpose of the solution
The overarching aim of ILC is to put Estonian companies and their solutions at the forefront of innovation in the world. The goal of all activities of the Club is to achieve real cooperation between companies, be it joint product testing, validation, development or anything else. Also, the Club strives for making conscious, purposeful and systematic innovation part of entrepreneurship and promote open innovation as preferred innovation strategy for companies.
Impact
The Innovation Leaders Club has grown into the biggest innovation community and ecosystem in Estonia – today it has almost 80 members, out of which 46 are growth or large companies and public sector organisations, and 32 are start-ups.
According to the member feedback of the previous season (Sept 2022 – June 2023):
• 83% of members claim that their R&D&I investments have grown more than 2% over the last year
• 92% of members say that they have invested this money into product development, 75% into collaboration with R&D institutions, and 50% into the development of product portfolio
• 83% of members claim to have got new innovation knowledge from ILC, 66% have created new business contacts, 25% have spotted new collaboration opportunities, and 16% have restructured their services
• Recommendation index of Innovation Leaders Club is 9.1/10
• Innovation Leaders Club has been one of the initiators and creators of the Innovation Ladder self-assessment tool for companies and is now in the process of entering a consortium together with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications and The Estonian Employers’ Confederation to continue developing the tool further and help test, validate and launch it to the market for Estonian companies.
What is innovative about it?
The Innovation Leaders Club is the first and one of a kind open innovation ecosystem and platform in Estonia. It brings together stakeholders from very different profiles and backgrounds, but all with the same ambition, mindset and willingness to harness the potential of open innovation and embrace new corporate innovation knowledge and practices for the sake of the development of their organisations.
The Club offers very practical and hands-on formats for knowledge and experience exchange and for creating collaboration opportunities, like:
• Regular meetups and events for innovation knowledge sharing and networking
• Matchmaking meetings between startups, scale-ups and corporations
• Failure-night-format collaborative learning experiences
• Company study visits
• Exchange of contacts for collaboration
• Workshops and demos of new innovation tools
Innovation Leaders Club, created and run by Tehnopol and SEB Bank, is a unique formation – it's an innovation service to companies by nature, but it has a voice in business circles and it has grown into a known and respected role model and opinion leader in matters that concern business development through (open) innovation.
Who are the main users?
There are mainly two types of member companies in ILC – corporations and start-ups whose product is in the stage suitable for testing, validating or joint product development with a corporation. On top of those profiles, ILC members comprise public sector organisations and scale-up companies.
Who runs it?
The ILC team consists of Tehnopol and SEB innovation team members. However, the majority of operational load is on Tehnopol and SEB has a more supportive role. ILC also has a Supervisory Board, consisting of representatives of Member companies, which is responsible for strategic planning and development of the Club.