Buy from startups to speedup sustainability change
For a small and growth-oriented business, customers are at the center of everything. In the built environment, technology solutions and sustainable services are often targeted toward large organizations, both public and private, which can sometimes make it difficult to establish customer relationships. The Smart Business, Big Impact initiative builds new practices that help startup collaboration. This will enable the adaptation of new technologies quicker than before.
This benefits startups, companies implementing sustainable solutions, and the entire Finnish society. For startups, customers enable growth and eventually internationalization, while for larger companies, they provide agile development of solutions for sustainability transitions and possibly new international business. Society benefits from growing new and sustainable businesses as well as reduced emissions.
Concrete actions in the initiative
- Work through concrete challenges in the built environment sector owned by cities, corporations, or other large stakeholders.
- The participants will create concrete ways to involve startups in creating and adopting sustainable solutions to enable their growth.
- Enable companies and cities to become more agile in development and to collaborate with the best startups.
- Draft a joint statement within the industry, committing to closer collaboration in the future and earmarking project funding for startup procurement.
- The lessons learned gathered to create a guide on how to work more effectively with startups in built environment development projects.
- Startup pitch events for industry players to learn about suitable new solutions.
