Among the more than 100 companies that participated in Brokerage events organized alongside the 4th Innovation Days, the search for partnerships and business opportunities is clear. Although results usually come in the long term, and not immediately, some already have previous success stories to tell.
ISA, Shorcut and Softi9 are among the Portuguese technology companies with several meetings scheduled in the last few days at the Contact Grants organized by the Innovation Agency. With more or less experience of participating in these events where meetings between companies and / or researchers are organized, they already have success stories to tell.
Jorge Serrano Pinto, General Director of Softi9, managed to give a boost to its internationalization strategy through a contact developed with Simple, a company from Poland that is among the four largest software companies in the country. The two companies identified synergies in these meetings in the area of ​​ERP development, with complementary solutions.
Participation in contact exchange events in the last 6 years, especially those taking place and parallel with CeBIT, brought Jorge Serrano Pinto an experience that now allows him to more efficiently select meetings in contact exchanges. «I learned to say» no «. If we do not accept all the proposed meetings and do only those that are of interest from the beginning, we can be more effective ”, he stresses.
This perception of which meetings really matter requires a great “homework”, a preparation that Nuno Martins, Innovation Developer at ISA – Intelligent Sensing Anywhere, guarantees to be fundamental. The analysis of the proposals for meetings, in coordination with the commercial, technological and management departments, allows the identification of the most relevant areas for establishing partnerships and also the proposals of the company itself in the contact exchanges.
Contact fellowship meetings mostly end up in partnerships, as happened recently with Lense, a German company of a sleep apnea researcher who will collaborate with ISA on the pilot in the hospital environment of the sleep @ home project.
Even when no partnerships or commercial contacts are established, the meetings can be used to prospect the market, to know what other companies are developing and to know the “state of the art”. This was the initial vision with which Valter Henriques from Shortcut, began to participate in these meetings. This year the company has already adopted another strategy and focused more on two of its products, K-now and Smart Packager, looking for complementary solutions.
At CeBit, Valter Henriques established some contacts that may soon bear fruit, with the Russian company Avicomp with which he made a partnership and technology exchange protocol, but also with Aquamobile, which has a technology for validating the authenticity of printed documents which may be useful in Portugal in solutions for municipalities.
These are just three cases among multiple companies that have been using contact exchanges as a way to project their companies, to achieve partnerships and commercial contacts. And, at least among them, there is a guarantee that they want to continue to be present at AdI’s Brokerage Events.
Fatima Hunter
