Overview

From the 26th to 28th of May, the third Connective Cities Practitioners’ Workshop took place at Malzfabrik, Berlin. The workshop targeted German and international experts from the field of local economic development as well as representatives of start-up promoting environments such as Innovation Labs or Co-Working Spaces and was organized in cooperation with the Berlin Senate Department for Economics, Technology and Research within the scope of the Asia-Pacific Weeks Berlin.

It was designed as a follow-up event of the Dialogue Session on ‘Promoting Innovative and Sustainable Start-ups’ from December 2014 in Berlin, which had shown that the topic of start-up ecosystems seemed to be particularly relevant. Based on the main outcomes, this follow-up event answered questions that appeared in the first event and concretized fields of work in order to create tangible future projects. Just as the previous event on start-ups, this event focused on Asia, with the majority of participants coming from Asian cities.

Keynotes

Key Note by Dr. Thomas Funke, Director entrepreneurship, RKW Kompetenzzentrum, Eschborn, Germany:
Entrepreneurship Ecosystems.

Key Note by Ahmed Bastawy, icealex, Alexandria, Egypt:
Local Ecosystems. Innovation. Collaboration. Entrepreneurship.

Key Note by Martin Venzky-Stalling, Senior Advisor, Creative Chiang Mai:
The Southeast Asian Creative Cities Network: An organic bottom up network of ASEAN “second cities” with creative city / economy and other relevant initiatives, assets and resources.

Results

The Practitioners’ Workshop objective was to define and exploit key factors of the development of start-up promoting environments with regard to the necessary framework conditions in order to develop strategies tackling regional challenges and improving the start-up ecosystems. Furthermore, concrete answers for location-specific questions and challenges in order to create a favorable start-up ecosystem were developed. Regional networks of south-south-cooperation were created in order to exchange experiences and initiate a demand-based peer-to-peer consultation process to support local development strategies.

The participating cities were represented by both representatives of Innovation Labs or other supporting institutions (private or PPP) as well as representatives of the local economic development agencies or other officials in charge of economic development. Through the exchange of good practices and by conducting peer-to-peer consultation sessions, the participants were able to discuss about improvements of existing start-up surroundings of the different regions and performed mutual advice for other participants that were looking for concrete answers to current and future challenges of start-up ecosystems in their regions.

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