Promoting startups with the government of Japan

Public Administration

Category

Matchmaking

Project duration

2 months

JETRO, building bridges between Japan and Spain

9 Japanese startups are willing to land in Spain with the help of Peninsula. Our challenge? To find the right partners to ensure a win-win between Japanese startups and Spanish corporations.

The Spanish headquarters of the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO), in charge of business and trade relations between Spain and Japan, needed to detect some corporations in our country that could be interested in technologies and services from 9 Japanese startups from their base, and in Peninsula we were asked to carry out a matchmaking for them with some enterprises from our network.

Technology exchange, products exports and imports, talent flow, industrial cooperation… These are just some of the goals JETRO aims to achieve with these initiatives, that want to create links between companies from Japan and other countries to ease Japan’s internationalisation.

35 arranged meetings

16 corporations involved

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Starting point

In order to find Spanish corporations willing to meet with the 9 Japanese startups with international growth aspirations, a first part of startup analysis was carried out.

In Peninsula we carried out a work session with each one of them to, besides analysing their value proposition and seeing how to translate it to potential partners, realise recommendations about how to contact European companies and elaborate their one-page deck.

Solution

To encompass a bigger number of corporations and to make sure each startup could have valuable appointments that could really turn into real collaboration, we did both a mass email campaign and a customised contact with some enterprises, besides of a close follow-up to schedule and organise meetings to make it a smooth and efficient process.

STEP 1. Contact and recruitment

At first, and after having analysed every startup to know their business model and the needs they satisfied, we contacted potential corporations within our wide database in two different ways: through a more large-scale emailing campaign, and through one-to-one contact with corporate executives that were already in our network.

STEP 2. Management and schedule

From there, we established an individualised contact with all the leads from the interested corporates that wanted meetings with one or more startups from JETRO, so we could align agendas, solve doubts, see the most optimal moment to arrange the meetings or satisfy some particular needs that could arise.

STEP 3. Matchmaking and introduction

Once all the meetings were scheduled, we handed the startups and the corporations a personalised calendar with all the calls for their online meetings, and the contact details from the other side were given to them in case there was any inconvenience. Besides, the day of the meeting, members from the Peninsula team worked as enablers, introducing both companies and making sure there were no technical issues.

STEP 4. Follow-up

After celebrating all the planned meetings, the members of our team contacted personally with each involved party to make sure every meeting had gone well and to check whether they had found opportunities to explore in future meetings, to evaluate if the executed matchmaking had been successful.

Results

Although at the beginning of the project we agreed with JETRO to set 27 meetings (3 for each startup) we finally arranged 35, given the fact that some corporations were interested in several startups. The meetings were very useful, they helped to present the Japanese technologies in Spain and to find potential partners both now and in the future.

With the project finished, many startups are still in touch with the corporations, planning to carry out pilots of their products in the companies, setting new meetings or even introducing other partners and new corporations with room for collaboration.