Social entrepreneurship

Heidi Berg and her team was one of the winners of the first round of Ignite intrapreneurship programme. She and Nazmin Neza are now developing Engage, a new business venture, in Grameenphone, Telenor Group’s company in Bangladesh. The goal with our product is to help over one million sales agents in Telenor to communicate better with their customers. “We are …

In these Trump-times it seems more important than ever to discuss discrimination and how we solve it. As the sharing economy grows it brings to light societal issues of bias and discrimination; but new approaches to data and business models offer hope that bias can one day be a thing of the past. By Pernille Spang Lyndegaard Uncovering racial bias …

Last year, the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, launched the first Young Transatlantic Innovative Leaders Initiative, an international exchange program focused on the themes of entrepreneurship skills and enhanced Euro-Atlantic integration. They selected 45 young professionals from 41 European countries, including some of the Nordics and Baltics. During the program, the fellows spent time in …

Norway has only recent emerged as a startup hub, with it now leading the Nordics as the fastest grower in number of investments. However the Norwegian scene is often not acknowledged beyond Opera, and we think it’s time that changed. 1. nLink: Mobile drilling robots  Love them or hate them, the right robot can save us time and money. And the folks at nLink …

Slush, the largest startup event in the Nordics, took place in the “death month” of November in Helsinki. With over 15,000 attendees comprising 1,700 startups, the array of new companies and technologies can be dizzying.  From the SLUSH 100  pitching competition to the 240 demo booths, here are 5 startups that caught our eye.   FairStart FairStart is a startup …

This weekend, the Danish entrepreneur prize “Den Gyldne Fugl”, or the Golden Bird, was  awarded at Aarhus University. The winner was RaskRask, a platform for on-demand health-oriented massage, who previously offered on-demand physiotherapy.  The market is always right. That was the reason for the shift in focus that Raskrask.dk performed this year. They pivoted from an on-demand physiotherapy platform to …

Startup Everywhere, a Danish creative content and self-publishing startup, has just launched an app which helps entrepreneurs to navigate cities around the globe. It features co-working spaces, incubators, accelerators, and public working spaces such as cafes with good wifi.  It is currently available in six cities including Copenhagen, Berlin, Lisbon, and Stockholm. Over the last year, founder Sissel Hansen and …

It was perhaps significant that the recent Oslo Innovation Week (OIW) five-day series of events was preceded by a forty-eight hour Techfugees hackathon where more than one hundred data scientists, engineers, user experience designers and entrepreneurs united in teams to build prototypes alongside refugees, to find solutions to enable better integration into Norwegian society. the Techfugees Hackathon Techfugees is a …

Tallinn-based scientific collaboration platform Guaana is giving out 10 percent of the company to users for free, hoping to involve them more tightly in its quest to define a new, universal format for scientific projects. The effort has a similar to target to many equity crowdfunding campaigns on platforms like FundedByMe or Invesdor where startups sell equity not just to …

Impact Iceland 2016 is crowdfunding Iceland’s first conference on social entrepreneurship on Karolina Fund.  It will be the first in a series of conferences in Iceland focusing on social innovation as a profitable, sustainable, and impactful response to today’s challenges. Tanja Wohlrab-Ryan writes at Startup Iceland about making Iceland not only a vibrant startup community, but a hub of social …

Denmark is riding on a green wave.  The country has been lauded for its focus on sustainable energy, recycling, and high quality of life.   The Danish startup Miljøskærm,  based at the science park at Scion DTU, uses all these values to make its defense against traffic noise – the company builds barriers out of old windmills. The Danish startup …

Sustainability is more than an environmental concept – it’s big business too.  At the Impact Investor Ball last week, several startups pitched their products for a more sustainable future.  Lean Green was one of them.  The company has developed a festival chair in biodegradable and recyclable cardboard. The chair has been a hit at Roskilde Festival, the annual music festival …

The Stockholm-based healthy food startup Naturalbox explains their successful crowdsourcing campaign on Prowly. Results: coverage in key media channels, nearly 100 investors, 212% campaign overfunding. In order to raise capital for its operations, Naturalbox chose crowdsourcing over a traditional VC, engaging its customers, friends and fans. To make that happen, the startup decided to leverage all the advantages of social …

Start-up founders who focus on issues of resource preservation, resource recovery and recycling, often lack access to funding opportunities, as they have difficulty competing the b2b scale-ups that investors see as big money. That is why in 2014 Green Alley, a strategic circular economy investor based in Berlin, initiated the annual Green Alley Award, Europe’s first start-up competition for entrepreneurs wanting …

When you surf the internet, different companies gather your data in the form of so-called cookies, which are used to, for example, tailor advertising.  Now, the Danish ISP Waoo has developed a new plugin that allows you to donate your data to charity. On the internet, your data is used daily by companies, who are interested to find out how …

The InnoFrugal Conference acts as a forum for best practices, policy analysis, sharing the latest thinking and highlighting success in frugal innovation. The second annual InnoFrugal event was held last week at Heureka, the Finnish Science Centre in Vantaa, a few minutes north of Helsinki. Co-organised by the non-profit Nordic Frugal Innovation Society and the Ministry For Foreign affairs Finland, …

Reshopper helps families to recycle items such as clothes through their platform, which joins local buyers and sellers.  Now, former AirBnB manager Aja Guldhammer Henderson has joined Reshopper to help them flourish abroad. For last four years, 31-year-old Aja Guldhammer Henderson has been a key figure behind the sharing economy-success of AirBNB in Scandinavia and the Netherlands.  She has now …

Startup Refugees, set up by Finnish journalists and entrepreneurs Riku Rantala and Tunna Milonoff, gives refugees the skills to enter the workforce and set up businesses. Rantala and Milonoff got the idea for the project while doing their series Docventures, a popular combination of political documentary films and talk show. The adventurous pair felt they needed to stimulate people’s thinking …

Startup Tourism, a new 10-week accelerator program held in Iceland from February 1st, 2016, is now in full swing.   As the number of tourists in Iceland increases exponentially, startups rush to fill the challenges that arise. Oddur Sturluson, managing director of Startup Tourism, believes there has been a paradigm shift among tourism companies in Iceland, spurned by recent history. “After …

Sjálfsbjörg, the Icelandic federation of physically disabled people, has recently opened up a new entity within the organization called Frumbjörg, an Innovation Center with the aim of supporting innovations for the disabled. It has been obvious for many within the community of disabled in Iceland, and those around it, that there has been a deep need for more focused research …