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| Martin Kenney, Randy Mitchell och Sara Modig. |
Last week ESBRI organized the annual
Sweden-U.S. Entrepreneurial Forum together with the
Swedish Ministry for Enterprise, Energy and Communications and the
U.S. Department of Commerce. This
year for the 8th time. About 650 participants in Stockholm, Umeå and Gothenburg
shared their knowledge and discussed with our great delegation from the United
States.
The delegation was led by Randy Mitchell from the U.S.
Department of Commerce. So first of all I would like to express a big thank you
to Randy and the others in the delegation. Particularly to John Backus, New
Atlantic Ventures, Kimberlie Cerrone, Tiatros, Clare Fairfield, Concerto
Ventures, and Erik Straser, Mohr Davidow. All of them took a week out of their
busy schedules to participate in this year’s Forum.
Yes, I know this post might seem like a speech at the
Oscar’s, packed with “thank yous”. Nothing to do about that.
To cover all the good ideas that were presented would
make a post that is too long, so I will just mention a few here and come back
in the future to write about some more. I would like to suggest that you read
previous posts on this blog (if you know Swedish or trust Google translate :))
and look at the Twitterfeed #sweus from the Forum.
One thing that I always want to stress (and have stressed
before on this blog) is the importance of the acceptance of failure. Several of
the speakers did address this. A “smart” failure is perfectly fine in for
instance Silicon Valley. The important thing is that the entrepreneurs show
that they have learned from the failure. And in this context the failures are
often that the start-up is dismantled, it is not a bankruptcy.
Another topic that was discussed, at the different
forums, is the role of the large companies. They are important as customers, as
vehicles to take the small companies to larger export markets, and also as exit
markets for start-ups that have received angel and VC funding. Given how many
leading global companies we have in Sweden, hopefully some of them can take
this role in the future.
Besides the speakers that travelled with us for the whole
week, we also had a number of speakers who contributed greatly to the Forum. In
Stockholm on Monday 26th: William Stewart, U.S. Embassy, Anders Flodström, KTH,
Sara Öhrvall, Bonniers, Martin Kenney, University of California at Davis,
Tazeem Pasha, U.S. Department of Commerce, Elisabeth Thand Ringqvist,
Företagarna, and Catharina Håkansson Boman and Sara Modig from the Swedish
Ministry of Enterprise, Energy and Communications.
In Umeå we had Håkan Boter, Umeå University, Anna
Olofsson, Umeå municipality and Stefan Nordin, Umbio.
In Gothenburg we had Martin Lackéus, Gothenburg Schools
of Entrepreneurship, Chalmers and Gothenburg University, John Sjölander, Burt
AB, Martin Skoglund, Wood & Hill Investment and Timo Lehes, Chalmers
Innovation Seed fund.
A big thanks to all of you!
Programmes and power points from the Forum can be found
on the
Sweden-U.S. website. Within a week you will be able to watch video clips
from all the presentations made in Stockholm on
ESBRI’s web-TV.
EDIT: An article on the Forum day in Stockholm has now been published.
Finally, I would like to thank all the participants that
came to the Forum, our main partners
Tillväxtverket and
VINNOVA, our partners
Hamilton and
PwC, our regional co-organizers and partners
Dare,
Umeå University,
Umeå municipality,
Chalmers,
Gothenburg university and
Västra Götaland Region, our network partners
Företagarna and
Venture Cup, and our
media partner
Entreprenör magazine.
And last but not least my team at ESBRI did, as always, a
great job in creating “a world class forum” (a quote from one of our American
speakers)
Without all of your support and encouragement there
wouldn’t be a Forum.
/Magnus
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