Innowave Summit, in partnership with Pegasus Tech Ventures, will host the first Startup World Cup Regional Event in Romania. The event will happen during the 2nd day of Innowave Summit 2022, which will take place between 18-20 May in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

Only 10 Startups will compete to be crowned as the Champions of Startup World Cup Romania and have the chance to win 1,000,000 USD at the Grand Finale on September 30, 2022 in San Francisco, USA.

The startups will have 5 mins for pitching and 5 mins for Q&A from the jury. A jury will evaluate the 10 startups during the competition. A special guest in the jury will be one of the first people to advise Steve Jobs in his early years.

Are you a startup? Sign up for the competition before 8th of May: startupworldcup.io/romania-app-2022

Innowave Summit is a Varna Brand Event and is held for the first time in Cluj-Napoca, being one of the largest innovation events in Central and Eastern Europe, organized by the Bulgarian Business Forum (Varna), C-EDU Cluster of Education (Cluj-Napoca) and Municipality of Cluj-Napoca in partnership with the City of Varna – in the strategic activities of the first pan-European platform for collaboration and stimulation of start-ups in Europe and the world, StartupCities Platform, in which the two cities Varna and Cluj-Napoca function as founding members.

The connection and collaboration of the two cities are especially important in the context of the European Year of Youth. In the presence of the European commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth Mariya Gabriel, the President of the European Committee of the Regions Apostolos Tzitzikostas and some of the most innovative mayors in Europe, Innowave Summit will show how two European cities work together to bring Youth and Education to the next level. 

Startup World Cup is a global conference and competition that brings together the top startups, VCs, entrepreneurs and world-class tech CEOs. The organization behind it is partnering with some of the world’s largest conferences and tech events to host 60+ regional startup competitions for North  America, Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, and Australia.

Some of the most brilliant entrepreneurs like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Marc Randolph (Netflix), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn) have been speakers and jury members at the Startup World Cup Finale.

Connected events during the days of Innowave Summit under the StartupCity Cluj-Napoca Days:

• The Europe Goes Local initiative will host a transnational conference in Cluj-Napoca during 17- 20 May. 
• In the context of the European Year of Youth, actors from the local ecosystem will also organize a series of events and youth actions in the city. 
• On 19th May a Local dialogue with the citizens – co-organized by the European Committee of the Region and the Municipality of Cluj-Napoca on the topic of “Europe Starts in Transylvania. Building the strong foundation of the House of European Democracy”
• In the morning of May 19th, it will be marked the official establishment of the Network of European Youth Capitals with a signing ceremony. 

All the above-mentioned events together with Innowave Summit 2022 aim to celebrate innovation and youth contribution to the participatory reconstruction of Europe’s cities and communities through young people.

This initiative will further the good connection and collaboration between both cities Cluj Napoca and Varna. Thus, through this collaboration, Bulgaria and Romania will continue their efforts to support start-ups, local public authorities, catalysts of the local innovation ecosystem and innovative bottom-up initiatives to retain talent in the region.

More about Startup World Cup you can find here: startupworldcup.io/grand-finale

Book your place for Innowave Summit 2022: innowavesummit.com/home-en/

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On November 25th, during the Global StartUp Summit European conference, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, was appointed as a project leader in healthcare innovation and artificial intelligence within the European Innovation Area (#EiA), a new European project created to encourage innovation, whose ambassador is the European Commissioner for Innovation, Mariya Gabriel. Cluj will act within the #EiA together with Valencia, Cologne, Leuven and other European cities recognized for their initiatives in the fields of innovation and sustainable development. 

Under the tagline “MedTech StartupCity Cluj-Napoca”, Cluj-Napoca City Hall will manage within the European Innovation Area a pioneering action at European and global level, called “Health iArea”, aiming to create an attraction point for new economic opportunities for the city related to startups and SMEs, with healthcare products and services for hospitals and citizens. 

“Cluj-Napoca now takes over the management of the Health iArea, in order to create new economic opportunities for Romania and Europe. Our goal is to accelerate innovative solutions for one of the most important components of our lives: our health.“, said the mayor of Cluj-Napoca, Emil Boc, following the appointment.

Innovation fund and coworking space dedicated to startups in healthcare and artificial intelligence, financed by the City Hall of Cluj-Napoca

As a first concrete step to support innovation in healthcare and artificial intelligence, the Municipality of Cluj-Napoca will create an innovation fund dedicated to startups, with funding from the local government, alongside private and European funding, as well as a coworking space. The amount announced by Mayor Emil Boc as an investment by the City Hall in the innovation fund amounts to over 500,000 RON, to which private contributions from local businesses, contributions from international foundations (€350,000) and European funding will be added.

“Investing in healthcare innovation is very profitable, but in the longer term. If you invest in innovation, education, startups, that investment goes back into the ecosystem and can generate exponential growth. I am pleased with the initiative of Cluj-Napoca City Hall to create this innovation fund, because investment in innovation has the chance to be multiplied several times. There is a dose of risk, but it is offset by the benefits of the mindset and the benefits of developing and accessing the resources that the ecosystem gains.“, said Dr. Ion-Gheorghe Petrovai, co-founder of FreshBlood HealthTech community in Cluj, endorsing the decision of the Cluj-Napoca City Hall.

According to the statements of Mayor Emil Boc, Cluj-Napoca City Hall wants to offer collaboration opportunities to startups to develop the city’s capabilities in terms of business competitiveness and more. The European Union has specified that the three components that will be emphasized in the next period will be the “green”, “resilience” and “digital”, and within the digital component, the field of healthcare will have an extremely accelerated growth in the next period, being the area most likely to innovate the most. The healthcare field is where it is also expected that most European funds will be concentrated, but also the largest local and national resources.

Cluj ecosystem of healthcare innovation

The pandemic has already proven that only if we work together we can succeed, and the spirit of collaboration is the one which the Cluj innovation ecosystem has embraced for several years, including both local government, local and national NGOs, universities, companies, startups and other institutions.

One of the main catalysts of healthcare innovation and an expression of the involvement of local civil society in Cluj-Napoca is FreshBlood HealthTech, an NGO that has been actively supporting healthcare startups for many years. FreshBlood has been the hub of EIT Health in Romania for several years, and since May 2019 it has become connected to the European Connected Health Alliance, a European ecosystem network, forming the regional network Transylvania Digital Health Ecosystem, in order to increase the quality of regional health services, through European collaboration and technology.

In 2020, FreshBlood carried out several major projects, including creating a map of Romanian health innovators (startups, innovative projects, etc.), collaborating with universities through GIPIA (Interuniversity Group for Innovation and Entrepreneurship), a group dedicated to interdisciplinary training and encouraging collaboration in research and business development of students, as well as funding innovative projects in healthcare. 

“We at EIT Health and Fresh Blood place great value on encouraging discussions and collaborations. We encourage projects in which not only an entity or a person comes up with a solution that they find interesting, but especially projects which are a result of collaboration between several entrepreneurs and which obviously meets all their needs”, says Dr. Ion-Gheorghe Petrovai, Project Director of EIT Health Hub Romania and co-founder of FreshBlood HealthTech.

Other key players in the local healthcare innovation ecosystem include the Transilvania IT Cluster, School of Public Health of Babeș-Bolyai University, and other universities in Cluj, including the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca and the University of Medicine and Pharmacy of Cluj-Napoca.

They are joined by the business environment and a growing number of successful local startups. Recently, .lumen, a startup from Cluj-Napoca, launched glasses for the blind with a system of assistive technology, which addresses the mobility of the blind. .lumen was founded by Cornel Amariei, inventor, together with Dr. Gabriel Chindriş, university researcher in the field of electronic engineering at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca and Mihai Ivașcu, CEO and founder of M3 Holdings. In the last year, .lumen has attracted investments of over €1 million, the organization has tripled its team size compared to May and estimates an increase of over 100 employees by the end of 2021.

Cluj universities, the place where the innovators of tomorrow grow

In addition to local government, NGOs and startups, Cluj universities are one of the key factors in the development of Cluj’s innovation ecosystem. In a webinar organized on November 23rd, 2020 by Forbes Romania and EIT Health, with the theme “How did Romanian healthcare innovators become competitive at European level?”, the representatives of the universities of Cluj-Napoca presented the vision of the university environment on the role it has in the local innovation ecosystem.

Thus, Prof. Christian Săcărea, Vice-Rector of Babeș-Bolyai University (UBB) argued that the university must create an environment conducive to innovation and identification of those who have potential, the role of the university being to open doors, provide opportunities, provide guidance, find those projects applied research to whet the appetite for innovation. 

“The innovation component is essential in a university that respects itself and goes beyond its role as a standard trainer. What the university should do, first of all, is to provide an environment conducive to innovation and to identify those who really have potential. We live on a mountain of creativity that students, researchers and teachers have, but it must be valued. In order to value it, you have to find those who really have potential. On a theoretical level, everyone wants to innovate and give their opinion as the best, but to innovate really you have to have the right mindset and you have to be serious in your approach.”, said Prof. Christian Săcărea.

Also, says Christian Săcărea, it is important to bring students in contact with those who know how to do entrepreneurship, in order to have a human-to-human interaction. UBB plans to introduce next year a cross-curricular entrepreneurship course, to which all students will have access and which will be supported by personalities with extensive experience in entrepreneurship.

In his turn, Prof. Răzvan Cherecheș, Director of the Public Health Department / Center for Healthcare Innovation within UBB mentioned that only by financing innovation can we have quick answers. Universities provide a context for innovators and train their teams. Innovation is created by overcoming obstacles, and Romania, considers Prof. Răzvan Cherecheș, is an extremely good place for innovation because there are many obstacles and unmet needs, thus offering phenomenal opportunities. 

“With this pandemic, I discovered how unprepared the public health field in Romania was. It caught us completely unprepared. Innovation was not fast enough and well enough funded. We are still in a period of transition. It turned out that only by financing innovation can we have quick answers. We need to see the opportunities. An extremely simple example would be to identify the opportunities that are generated by the deficit. Research in Romania has not been funded for many years. It’s with the wheels up. This means that we have researchers and, implicitly, students who would like to be involved in research, but do not have a context. So, innovation appears as an alternative for them. Therefore, we have a greater involvement of young people in innovation, because the research part is no longer a potential career, due to the lack of funding policies.”, said Prof. Răzvan Cherecheș.

Răzvan Cherecheș considers that we need a reform of the education model, its transformation into a model “problem based education”, in which the teacher transforms into a moderator, facilitator.

Doina Pîslă, Director of the Council for University Doctoral Studies of Technical University of Cluj-Napoca mentioned in her turn, the need for cooperation between the university and companies, mentioning as an example the Technology Transfer Center within the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca. 

“Our university also supports innovation and research excellence. What I find extremely challenging is the road from basic research to applied research, which can be done through cooperation between university entities and companies. We, the trainers, must be able to convey to our students and doctoral students how this is done. We support innovation through a Technology Transfer Center that we have at the level of the Technical University, a place where consulting for patents is offered, for example. All patents are analyzed. There are patents even in the field of health, with promising results. Of course, the road is long from idea to implementation in the medical environment, it also depends on the type of application that has been addressed.”, says Doina Pîslă.

Doina Pîslă considers very important the way in which entrepreneurship projects are approached: “We have a project that has been running for almost a year for our PhD students with the acquisition of transversal entrepreneurial skills extremely important for launching a company. When it comes to innovation, I believe that there must always be an interdisciplinary team of engineers, computer scientists and doctors. We have an extremely good collaboration with the University of Medicine and Pharmacy of Cluj-Napoca. ”

As explained by Dr. Ion-Gheorghe Petrovai, Project Director of EIT Health Hub Romania and co-founder of FreshBlood HealthTech, the Cluj innovation ecosystem is currently on the right collaboration mindset, in which discussions and cooperation between several stakeholders are encouraged: “I always insist on the mindset side. It’s what we all need. Before we set out, we must believe that we will succeed and that we will progress – this is somehow contagious. Just as fear is transmitted among people, the winning attitude is transmitted just as quickly. It is important to see it as a development priority. Because the ecosystem is the sum of us all and when someone rises, the others grow too, and thus we all evolve.“

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Cluj-Napoca, Romania, is the first East European city to make it into the final stage of the contest for the European Capital of Innovation award, within the 2020 edition, along with eleven other cities from across the rest of Europe. The European Commission will announce the winner and the runners-up of the European Capital of Innovation 2020 contest at the European Research and Innovation Days taking place on 22-24 September 2020.

Cluj-Napoca (often referred to simply as Cluj) is the unofficial capital of Transylvania, Romania, and one of the most vibrant and cosmopolitan cities in Eastern Europe, a cultural center, an academic hub, and of one the most important innovation hubs of the country. Based on the software industry, Cluj-Napoca has developed tremendously in the last 15 years and nowadays is very active in terms of its startup ecosystem.

“The European Commission announcement reconfirms Cluj-Napoca as a city of innovation, focused on Research & Development, IT and on the use of smart city technology to increase the quality of life of all its citizens. You are not innovative, if you are not inclusive.”, said mayor of Cluj-Napoca, Emil Boc, upon the announcement.

Earlier this year, Cluj-Napoca decided to be one of the first cities to apply for the European Capital of Innovation award, as Mariya Gabriel, EU Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, launched the 2020 edition of the contest during the StartupCity conference held in Cluj-Napoca on the 5th of March. Shortly after the contest launch, the mayor of Cluj-Napoca, Emil Boc, announced that the city will apply for the title.

“The strengths of Cluj are those we have been talking about for a long time: the ecosystem and the partners who work together in this city. The IT companies played an extremely important role in the development of the city and continue to do so, but it’s the vision and leadership of the local public administration, and the team work of the universities and the research institutes that really makes the difference now. More than 4-5 years ago we have started to develop projects designed to bring innovation in all existing areas. Our plans for the next years, 2021-2027, refer to the development of the Transilvania Digital Innovation Hub, where the member clusters in the Cluster Consortium of Northern Transylvania and the universities of Cluj will be an active part. In a cross-sectoral approach, technology is also an enabler, the element that supports innovation in all the other areas of activity in our city and region”, said Bianca Muntean, Cluster Manager at Transilvania IT Cluster, one of the key players of Cluj-Napoca’s innovation ecosystem.

The finalists of this year’s edition of the European Capital of Innovation award are: Cluj-Napoca (Romania), Espoo (Finland), Ghent (Belgium), Groningen (The Netherlands), Helsingborg (Sweden), Leeuwarden (The Netherlands), Leuven (Belgium), Linz (Austria), Milano (Italy), Reykjavik (Iceland), Valencia (Spain) and Vienna (Austria).

A high-level jury of independent experts selected the 12 finalists by analyzing how cities use innovative solutions to respond to societal challenges, how they use such practices in the urban development process and how they engage broad local communities in decision-making.

“Innovation is key for cities to ensure a sustainable recovery after challenging times. When cities nurture innovation ecosystems so that innovation actors and citizens meet and collaborate, they boost their development and resilience. The sixth edition of the European Capital of Innovation Award is set to be another strong contest and will showcase the best innovative practices that drive European cities forward.”, said Mariya Gabriel, Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth.

Also known as iCapital, this annual prize is funded by Horizon 2020, the EU research and innovation programme. It recognizes European cities that develop vibrant innovation ecosystems in order to address current public challenges and improve the lives of their citizens.

The prize awards six European cities in total. The first prize winner will join the community of previous European Capitals of Innovation – Barcelona, Amsterdam, Paris, Athens and Nantes. The winner city will receive the title of European Capital of Innovation 2020 as well as €1,000,000 to support its innovation activities and to enhance its capacity to connect individuals, public sector, academia, and businesses to deliver societal benefits for its communities. Five runners-up will get €100,000 each.

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Cluj-Napoca, Romania, decided to be one of the first cities to apply for the European Capital of Innovation award, as Mariya Gabriel, EU Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, launched the 2020 edition of the contest during the StartupCity conference held in Cluj-Napoca on the 5th of March. Shortly after the contest launch, the mayor of Cluj-Napoca, Emil Boc, announced that the city will apply for the title.

“I would like to inform you that after the announcement of the commissioner concerning the European Capital of Innovation, we took the decision to apply this year for the title. We have transformed our city from an industrial city to a city based on knowledge economy, a city having a lot of innovative policies in the field of public transport, of green policies, and also in public governance, like public participation and participatory budgeting process. I think we have some good practices to show that we can move the map, in terms of the European Capital of Innovation, from Western Europe to the Eastern Europe.”, said mayor of Cluj-Napoca, Emil Boc during the press conference following the StartupCity event in Cluj.

Also known as iCapital, this annual prize is funded by Horizon 2020, the EU research and innovation programme. It recognizes European cities that develop vibrant innovation ecosystems in order to address current public challenges and improve the lives of their citizens.

“Cluj is an inspiration for us, an example. My presence here is a support for more innovation ecosystems at local level, a support to show that cities are key players in this knowledge economy. Europe and all European cities are facing the same challenges. We have to tackle climate change, we have now to give answers to the digitalization, we have to give answers to our demographic challenges, and that’s why when we have for a first time this knowledge triangle – Education, Research and Innovation united, when we have good examples like this one in Cluj, we are encouraged.”, said commissioner Mariya Gabriel.

The prize awards six European cities in total. The first prize winner will join the community of previous European Capitals of Innovation – Barcelona, Amsterdam, Paris, Athens and Nantes. It will receive €1 million to ensure that its best innovative practices are shared and multiplied. To scale up innovation ecosystems across Europe, the contest will also reward the first five runners-up with €100,000 each to support their innovation activities and to enhance their capacity to connect citizens, public sector, academia, and businesses in order to deliver societal benefits for their communities.

The competition is open to cities with a minimum of 100,000 inhabitants from EU Member States and countries associated to Horizon 2020. A high-level jury of independent experts will evaluate how the applicant cities are pushing the boundaries of innovation by looking at the following criteria:

• Experimenting by testing and promoting innovative solutions to their societal challenges;
• Engaging citizens to participate to innovation, including designing policy and participate to its day-to-day implementation and use;
• Expanding its innovation capacity by becoming a desired destination for prospective entrepreneurs and a role model for other cities;
• Empowering citizens with tangible and measurable results of innovation.

The contest is open for applications until 23 June 2020 (17:00 CET). The first winner and the five runners-up will be announced during the European Research and Innovation Days on 22-24 September 2020 in Brussels.

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