Polish impact tour to Berlin
Meet outstanding Polish impact startups
Emerging ecosystem
Last 2-3 years saw a rise of a new breed of social and collaborative entrepreneurship in Poland. There are more and more people investing their time and effort in order to find great business models that can both generate financial profits and provide positive impact. A great wave of social entrepreneurship and impact investing has also come to Poland. We still lag behind Germany and other Western countries, but we’re on a good track to establish a stable and nourishing ecosystem for Polish impact startups.
Ingenious Business Network
In July 2013, Dawid Sokołowski founded the Ingenious Business Network (Sieć Sensownego Biznesu), with a goal to create an “Ingenious ecosystem”. He blended together his experience studying and working in UK, experience working in Business Angels Network and VC fund as well as extensive network amongst emerging impact communities and startups. The goal was to create an impact investing network and eventually a Social Venture Capital. During the last two years it was possible to build a community, organize couple of major events, organize numerous workshops, give dozens of lectures, and most importantly organize four mini-acceleration programs with 23 participants. Recently we opened a hub for the community in Warsaw called Sieciówka.
Lecture to impact startups at Uzdrowisko Warszawa
Community meeting in Młyn Zabierzów
Zmienia Się! Unconference
The pipeline
A major goal from the very beginning was to build a pipeline of investment-ready projects so that we could effectively present them to potential impact investors and build an impact investing network. We now have a very high quality projects in our pipeline and have developed an extensive network for scouting. We have also developed a system to work with impact startups so that they are investment ready.
Polish impact investors
Unfortunately, the ecosystem on investors’ side isn’t ready enough. Polish investors are conservative and very new to the idea so the initial interest many investors showed didn’t translate into serious investing. We got some offers from more traditionally-minded investors that weren’t worth the price at the end of the day. We’ve made only one small deal so far.
Tour to Berlin
We got a great feedback about our projects from people who “know the right people” in Berlin. A natural move is to turn to more developed impact ecosystems and Berlin’s is not only the closest but also quite a developed one. We believe it can give us a spark that we just need to start a boom.
Saturday 20th of February
We're hosting a pitching event in Warsaw for about 40-50 people. It’s gonna be a great opportunity for all teams to meet together and get feedback to polish things up before the tour.
Thursday 25th of February, 4.00 pm - 7.30 pm, Social Impact Lab - pitching event (invite-only)
12.30 am - 13.10 pm Lunch
1.30 pm - 2 pm - A quick tour at social impact lab
2 pm - 3.30 pm Dry round to feel more comfortable.
7 minutes pitch + 10-15 minutes for questions and answers will be just perfect to maximize value of the meeting on both sides and actually come up with some next steps like a list of questions to answer or expressing interest in more in-depth meeting.
We'll also pitch our idea for the Ingenious Venture Capital, which is about mostly seed stage social and collaborative startups with an aim to empower the entire impact ecosystem in Poland. It’d take about 30 minutes in total.
It’ll make it a 3.5-hour event given all breaks. It might be perceived as a bit long-ish, but we hope that having well-prepared quality startups justifies that.
There will be snacks and drinks after the event so we can stay and have some more time to network and talk.
Startup list at the bottom of the page. If you're interested please write a request for investor decks @dawid@sensownybiznes.pl.
The tour - ecosystem building
We're coming in an even larger group than 6 startup teams. We're coming as a group of leading Polish impact ecosystem builders. There will be 7-12 people who bring a new quality to the ecosystem and have a power to influence it.
Our goal is to find out more about Berlin's impact ecosystem and learn from German experiences. We have potential to make a big leap and the tour might be just the right trigger to make it happen.
Too often we're stuck with Polish experiences and our notions of what's possible and what's not. Visiting Berlin and talking to people who's already achieved a lot of what we're ahead of can empower us to make it happen.
We definitely haven't got a sufficient understanding of different roles in the ecosystem and how different playes cooperate with each other. Even more importantly we don't know well how to strenghten each stage of the pipeline so that the ecosystem strives and consistently "produces" quality impact startups.
We really want to take part in a discussion on Polish and German impact ecosystems to come up with ideas how we can create impact by empowering entire ecosystems and collaboration between them.
Friday 26th of February - The tour
9 am - 10.30 am Mandalah - a global Conscious Innovation Consultancy. They work with leading corporations on how they can innovate in new ways. They are a bridge between corporations and different communities, startups and ideas that emerge as an answer to new challenges.
More info: http://www.mandalah.com/
11.00 - 12.30 Agora Collective + meet with Coliga creators. Agora collective is a diverse community that explores new ways of creating and collaborating in a community. They blend coworking, permaculture, food, art and community together. There's a lot we have in common as Sieciówka. Coliga is a community that explores different collaboration models and opportunities by blending online and offline. We'll meet them at Agora.
More info: http://agoracollective.org/ and http://coliga.co/
12.30 - 13.30 Lunch break
14.00 - 15.30 Impact Hub - meeting with Nina Cejnar from Golden Deer and Markus Freiburg from FASE
We'll talk about impact ecosystem with a special emphasis on impact investing. We'll hear the story of Nina Cejnar - an impact investing veteran - and how impact investing evolved in Germany. We'll hear how different people and organisations got involved in that and what the major challenges are. Most importantly she'll tell us about the pipeline process and how to proffesionally approach impact investing.
More info: http://www.goldendeer.org/about-me
Later on, we'll be joined on skype by Markus Freiburg from FASE who will tell us what they do and what their approach to impact investing is. Most importantly, he'll tell us how the work with their pipeline.
Friday afternoon - workshop and networking
Friday 4 pm - 6.30 pm Workshop: German and Polish impact ecosystems - experiences, lessons, and cooperation
We'll gather influential people and organisations in Berlin's impact ecosystem such as Social impact Lab, Impact Hub, Yannick Sonneberg, Sebastian Straube, Nina Cejnar, Agora Collective and more to meet with the most influential impact people and organisations from Poland and we'll discuss how we can cooperate and what we can learn from German experiences.
4 pm - 4.30 pm Quick introductions
4.30 pm - 5 pm Presentation: The current state of the Polish impact ecosystem, challenges and opportunities. + The idea: A joint acceleration programme
5 pm - 5.30 pm Feedback - we'd like to hear feedback on what we can do to develop it and hints on what we should focus on and where our strenghts and weaknesses are.
5.30 pm 6.10 pm A focused discussion - we'd like to discuss about the most important part of the ecosystem that we can enhance - possibly a joint acceleration programme - and how we can cooperate as ecosystems and organizations.
6.10 pm - 6.30 pm Conclusions - we hope this tour is just the opening. We'll discuss how we can keep in touch and what the next steps we can take are.
6.30 pm + Friday Winedown at impact hub - Networking and drinks with the impact hub community.
8pm-ish - Spontaneus ideas for the time out - joint dinner and/or drinks (?)
Saturday 27th - to be confirmed
Impact startups - more info soon
Ingenious Business Network - (read more in Polish or google translate it.)
Some of our collaborative economy events - here and here
Some of the workshops - here and here
About Sieciówka (community hub launched in September)
Email: dawid@sensownybiznes.pl
Location: Irysowa 3A, Warsaw, Poland
Phone: +48 600 044 660