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Meet the world’s best start-ups at upcoming Seedstars Summit in Lausanne

Next week on 6 April 2017, more than 65 of the world’s best start-ups will gather in Lausanne for the Seedstars Summit 2017, the world’s biggest start-up competition in emerging markets. Dozens of young entrepreneurs will compete for equity investment and grants of up to $1.0m. ThinkSport met with Juliane Butty, regional manager for Latin America at Seedstars World, to learn more about this exciting event and the involvement of the sports industry.

ThinkSport:  This is the fourth edition of Seedstars Summit and the event has grown continuously since its first edition in 2014. Tell us a bit more about the idea and how it works?
Juliane Butty:  The idea of Seedstars World was born when two of its founders met while travelling Argentina and realised the impact of innovation and technology on emerging markets. Most emerging countries face similar challenges, such as a lack of good infrastructure, financial and economic instability as well as corruption. At the same time 57% of world GDP comes from emerging markets, 87% of the world’s population lives in emerging markets and 80% of the world's smartphones will be in emerging markets by 2020. All this implies a lot of opportunities. At Seedstars we believe in talented local entrepreneurs being best suited to deploy innovation and technology to drive progress. Our competition serves as a way to find the most promising start-ups in these countries and support them. We run more than 65 local competitions where we identify the best seed-stage start-ups. The winner of each local competition will then compete in the final running to be crowned the Seedstars World Global Winner. This is what will happen next week in Lausanne.

ThinkSport:  Is it a co-incidence that you choose the Swiss Tech Convention Centre at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) as location for this year’s Summit?
Juliane Butty:  No, it’s not. Seedstars identifies with many Swiss values, including its neutrality and quest for excellence. In addition, both Switzerland and the EPFL are great places for innovation. The Global Innovation Index ranked Switzerland as the most innovative country for several years now with high scores in technology outputs. Then, EPFL and its innovation park are exemplary in pairing research with entrepreneurial spirit. This has generated a considerable number of successful start-ups which have managed to commercialise great ideas. Therefore, EPFL is the perfect place to stage our event.

ThinkSport:  Do you also have finalists from the sport industry?
Juliane Butty:  Sport is closely connected to technology and for us it comes as no surprise that we have three sport-related start-ups among this year’s finalists. A start-up from Ukraine will present an innovative device which you can attach to your cameras, including Go Pros, to track everything that's going on during a specific activity, including number of dimensions, unattainable to regular cameras. This should be very interesting for extreme sports. Then, we have a start-up from Chile which will pitch its new medical devices developed for training during rehabilitation, including connectivity with bicycles and rowing machines. An Asian start-up will compete with its customised nutrition plans, which can also support the diets of athletes.

ThinkSport:  What can the sports industry learn from other sectors?
Juliane Butty:  I think it will be key for the sports industry to keep up with latest trends in technology which are evolving constantly. There are endless opportunities from digital media to augmented reality, data analytics, wearables and sports equipment.  And, as all sectors, sport should keep an eye on what is happening in emerging markets and help foster cooperation between emerging and developed markets. If you want to check out which new technologies may swirl up the sports industry, join Seedstars Summit next week! We expect about 1,000 participants.

Seedstars Summit 2016

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