4SMARTGrowth

Increase exports of smart solutions from the Central Baltic region

4SmartGrowth is a EU funded growth project running between 2019 to 2021 to increase exports of smart solutions from the Central Baltic region to new markets.

Does your company offer solutions that provide smart solutions on mobility, sustainability, healthy population, green solutions and energy consumption?

Do you want to generate sales on new markets? Do you need business collaborations and customized support to make it happen?

– If yes, 4SmartGrowth is developed with you in mind.

4SmartGrowth is a former public project between Sweden, Finland and Estonia with the aim to help SME’s and startups to reach new markets in China and Chile.

4SmartGrowth have helped companies to

• Get support for opening up new markets
• Get valuable information about meeting new markets
• Meet trusted and reliable partners in the addressed market
• Create a trusted network.

For the past two years, 4SmartGrowth have focused on finding growth-oriented SMEs with smart solutions on mobility, sustainability, healthy population, green solutions and energy consumption within the Central Baltic region to create new cross-boarder business opportunities, and export.

The project have all together provided export possibilities to the following selected markets:

• Chile
• Guangzhou region in China
• Hebei province in China

The 4SmartGrowth objectives that we focused on were

• 6 export missions of 30 SMEs from CB region to 3 new markets
• 3-4 sales agreements reached OR pilots implemented in 3 markets during or shortly after the project.
• 30 selected companies will be offered to join this unique opportunity

About 4SmartGrowth

A collaboration between Swedish Incubators and Science Parks, Västerås Science Park, Tehnopol, Turku Science Park and Business Tampere.

Project 4SmartGrowth aims at increasing the CB smart solutions providing SMEs export possibilities by opening the already existing business connections that partners have reached separately, into the joint use of all five partner regions ́ SMEs.

This is a unique approach that can only be based on a mutual trust and previous cooperation between the partners and the clusters that they represent.

Partners have existing cooperation and direct contacts with Guangzhou region and Hebei province in China and realistic plan on how to initiate business contacts in Chile. These regions are currently implementing Smart City Master Plans (or equivalent masterplans) and are actively looking for different smart solutions to implement these plans. Partners have agreed to jointly use these business connections to increase the CB region SMEs export. CB clusters have the potential to provide such solutions but need business support to reach the actual deals.

Partners have preliminarily agreed to focus on CB clusters that provide smart solutions on mobility, sustainability, healthy population, green solutions and energy consumption.

Benefit of chosen approach is twofold:

1. Partner regions and their target SMEs benefit from hard work that has been done separately by partners in order to establish and nourish these business connections, and based on that work, more SMEs and in a wider geographical area in CB will have the export possibilities;

2. Target markets, being huge in comparison with CB partner regions separately, will receive better and more complex product / service offers that better fit their needs in process of implementing their smart masterplans.

Project will create action plans for each market, select and train the SMEs that has potential to start export, develops the business support for SMEs tailor made for each market, and organises export missions / pilot cases implementation into the target markets.

Selected SMEs will be interviewed, assessed and invited to the market seminars to proceed more concretely with the exporting. It is expected that ca 30 SMEs are finally capable and willing enough to attend on the 2 missions to 3 markets (ca 4-5 SMEs per mission). Even though the second objective quantifies 3-4 expected sales to be reached, there is a larger impact of these export missions to the attending SMEs. Even if not all of them reaches the actual sales during 2 missions, they have the new established connections in new markets, experiences on what are their capabilities and development needs when it comes to their readiness to actually export, and newly established connections with other CB SMEs, which also has potential to lead into further product / service development and sales.

For more information:

Swedish Incubators & Science Parks

For our last event with 4SmartGrowth we arranged a conference in the digital tool Virbela, where we all met up as avatars. A few of our partners and companies that we got to work with during the project got to present how they work and what achievements they’ve made in the different markets. You can see the conference in the video below.