EIT Digital’ Health and Wellbeing Business Community participated with a stand at the Corporate Health Convention 2015 in Stuttgart on 19 and 20 May. The convention attracted 2.388 visitors and 146 exhibitors demonstrated innovative products, services and concepts for a healthier working environment. The Health and Wellbeing Business Community lined up with five companies to showcase their ICT innovations to the audience of decision makers and experts in workplace health promotion.
Did participation pay off?
Events like the Health convention are important in making the EIT Digital coached startups visible and offer good breeding ground to connecting the suppliers of ICT innovation to the buyers. Outi Toijala the Activity Lead of the Health and Wellbeing Business Community mentioned that the event turned out to be very relevant to participating startups. She says: We received in total up to 30 high quality partner leads that the relevant startups will be following up. Discussions with the local players helped them to understand the German corporate health market better and be more prepared for entering the market with support of EIT Digital Business Development Accelerator."
What do the startups say
Joining the EIT Digital Business Community stand, gave credibility to the startups in the big new market, as they were able to invite prospective new partners and existing partners on the spot. Of course it is interesting to see what the startups say on this. Five startups joined the EIT Digital stand: Wellmo, Tinnitracks, SOMA Analytics, HeiaHeia, Traxmeet.
Oliver Boldt, Business Development Manager of Traxmeet said: We had meetings pre-arranged with our target customers. Some of those target customers were also exhibitors themselves, so I also visited some of their stands. In preparation for the event and during the event, it was important to be there with an own stand. It adds credibility to us as a company and our business intentions as well as it eases up starting and conducting the discussion about the customer problem and how we can solve it with our ‘Traxmeet ìt's my life’ solution. We got several promising leads and are targeting to pilot with some of them."
Marc Wullings from Wellmo continued by saying: "We are really happy with the event,it gives us the right target group. As our target group is mainly service providers -like insurance
companies- who also exhibited here, it was a perfect opportunity to walk around and discuss our product with them. We got a good feel of the market and are much better prepared to go to Germany.”
Also the Finnish startup HeiaHeia looked back with a positive view. They managed to find good contacts and talked to people who know this market very well. They say: ”Best conversation have been so far with SMEs and several insurance companies were interested.”
For our German startups Soma Analytics and Tinnitracks, this event was some kind of a home game. They touched base with partners in the field of company health management, to explore the chances for cooperation.
All in all, the choice for the Health Convention proved to be a right decision to invest in. Next year the Convention takes place again on 10 and 11 May 2016. Perhaps we should note the date?
