“We need to move beyond silos and start collaborating across boundaries”

Formerly known as Kickstart Accelerator, Kickstart Innovation is a Swiss innovation acceleration program inaugurated in 2015 to provide startups and corporates with a platform to meet and establish collaborations. Now in its fourth year, the program has announced several changes recently, which Katka Letzing, Co-founder and Co-Lead of Kickstart Innovation shares in the interview.

Startupticker: You have changed from Kickstart Accelerator to Kickstart Innovation; what is the rationale behind the name change?

Katka Letzing: The word “accelerator” is commonly understood as a startup acceleration program, often dedicated to early-stage startups. Kickstart, however, is not a startup accelerator any more. It has grown into an ecosystem innovation platform – a B2B-program for later-stage startups and scale-ups as well as established partners to foster innovative solutions through collaboration. If you look at the 2019 pipeline, we have scale-ups with over 50 employees and over 80M USD funding which applied to join Kickstart. These companies look for new business opportunities and markets for scaling. We have evolved – and so have our name and logo.

Kickstart program is now running for the 4th consecutive year, what successes and challenges have you recorded over the years?

We are incredibly fortunate to manage a platform with over 50 partner organizations, from large corporations to innovative SMEs, (smart) city and cantonal departments, leading universities, research institutions, foundations and investors. We have seen the growing participation of CEOs in the executive program. And we are thrilled to support ecosystem innovations coming from Kickstart that can truly advance a sector or industry for the better – be it in education, food, smart cities, finance, health or cybersecurity. In business and society, we need to move beyond silos and start collaborating across boundaries. To see this happening in concrete Proofs-of-Concept and commercial partnerships have been the most rewarding successes for us.

The long-term development remains challenging. We need more companies and organizations to take a multi-year approach to ecosystem innovation. It would be a missed opportunity for our partners and for Switzerland to only approach Kickstart from a year-by-year perspective. Kickstart is almost entirely funded from the private sector despite its positive impact for Switzerland and the Swiss innovation and startup scene as a whole. Here, we are less fortunate than the leading startup and scale-up ecosystems such as in Silicon Valley, Israel or London.

What is the contribution of the program to the development of the Swiss open innovation ecosystem?

Kickstart is one of the largest initiatives, focusing on ecosystem innovation in Switzerland. In most industries and sectors, there’s still too much silo-thinking or only talk at best in a decentralized way. Kickstart aims to change this through its 100% focus on concrete collaborative projects with later-stage startups. We now have dozens of such projects, some of which have already been scaled to products, services and solutions in the market or public sectors. With our activities so far, we have achieved to engage national and global media and continue changing the mindset to radical collaboration within the country.

When the program launched in 2015 one idea was that founders from abroad might incorporate their startup in Switzerland after the accelerator program. Is this still a goal for Kickstart? Isn’t it very unlikely that more mature companies move to Switzerland?

Kickstart focuses on business partnerships. As we succeed in building valuable business connections between international startups and scale-ups with companies and organizations in Switzerland, these startups and scale-ups will choose to stay with parts of their team in Switzerland. Why else should an international startup come here, if it’s not for attractive business opportunities? So far, 30% of our alumni have offices or staff in Switzerland, including Project Rosie, Blockdox, Fintechdb and Fjuul. And we will see this grows even more in the future.

Previously, Veezoo launched the solution it developed with AXA, whom they met through the program. What other success cases have you recorded from your Alumni?

There are numerous examples of successful partnerships between our partners and the participating startups. KITRO, a Kickstart 2017 startup that aims at reducing food waste in restaurants, has started a successful collaboration with one of Switzerland’s largest retailers. Denmark-based EdTech Company and Kickstart 2018 participant Labster that just raised $21 million in Series B funding, one of the investor’s being our partner Swisscom Ventures, whom they had met during Kickstart. Furthermore, WriteReader has recently announced their partnership with Young Boys Bern to improve reading and writing amongst youngsters in Switzerland.

Many startups applied for the 2019 program this year, what is your impression on the quality of their solutions/ideas and the maturity of the startups?

We were quite impressed by this year’s startup applications from 55 countries. Both maturity and quality have increased significantly compared to earlier editions. For example, we have seen startups apply that have already raised double-digit million amounts or have a particularly extensive customer base and years of experience. Seeing this is excellent, as we aim to move more and more towards later-stage startups and scale-ups.

Are there any changes in the new program offers that startups will obtain this year?

One of the biggest changes is for sure the two new verticals Cybersecurity and HealthTech, which will bring in even more diversity and possibilities to collaborate within the batch. Through this, also the number of startups has increased: nearly 50 startups and scale-ups will be joining the 2019 batch. Likewise, the intrapreneurship program has grown from 1 team in 2017 to 5 teams last year and now 9 teams this year.

Just like startups, more partners have joined the program, what does that imply for the program and the overall Swiss startup ecosystem?

I think this is a positive signal for the Swiss innovation ecosystem. Numerous corporations and organizations recognize the potential of deep technologies and therefore show a growing interest in working with startups in order to remain innovative and future-oriented. We try to embrace this interest and develop new partnership models in order to be able to collaborate with even more partners from different fields and with various backgrounds and structures.

For startups nowadays the challenge does not lie in doing a PoC with the corporate, rather in advancing from a successful PoC to a long-standing collaboration in daily business. How does Kickstart support startups and corporates in overcoming this challenge?

Our focus is on encouraging collaboration and partnerships between organizations and startups. It is key to attract the right players and require the right determination, including CEO engagement, in order to move from PoC to commercial application. We support on-going PoCs and other partnerships with our alumni through consulting work after the program. One of the successful aspects have been of engaging the partners with our PoC Fund and we will grow that even more this year. The experiences of Kickstart are also shared in the Collaboration Book featuring different case studies to share the learnings for the entire sector free of charge.

The number of verticals has expanded this year, can we expect more verticals, for example, Social innovation to be opened up?

We are always looking into opportunities to develop the platform further. We cannot share any concrete plans yet, however, we are very excited about the Circular Economy Transition program launched by Impact Hub Switzerland and MAVA Foundation, as means to push sustainable business and technology in Switzerland. Switzerland should become the first circular economy in the world and Kickstart might have a role to play there.

What are some of the future plans for the program?

We are growing the program across all of Switzerland, also attracting more international players, including partners from abroad among others.

Photo by Elaine Pringle Photography: Katka Letzing