OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
Due to the need to postpone Whow! Innovation Festival , we made the decision to postpone, also, the ranking event of Ranking 100 Open Startups 2020 to the new date of 10, 11 and 12 November 2020.
Read our official positioning in
the 100 Open startups Open Letter to the ecosystem of innovation.
Open letter from 100 Open Startups to the innovation ecosystem
We are a network today with more than 12,600 startups. We have, over the past five years, collected data on engagement between companies and startups that practice open innovation in the country. These data are translated — without a jury or subjective criteria — into the Ranking 100 Open Startups, an annual and objective list of the most attractive startups for the corporate market.
The 2020 edition of the Ranking broke records for declared contracts, startups and registered companies , largely surpassing the results of the 2019 edition, and the official award was planned as a major celebration of the ecosystem during the Whow! Innovation Festival, which would take place as a face-to-face event, now in July.
Suddenly, the world turned upside down with a pandemic and, to a greater or lesser degree, caught us all off guard.
For the Ranking 100 Open Startups, this scenario generated some direct impacts: the first was the necessary postponement of Whow! Innovation Festival for November, and its transition to digital format. In addition, most of the data collected for the Ranking portrayed the pre-Covid-19 scenario, without considering the important moment of resilience and adaptability that the pandemic required of startups in 2020.
We also understood that we needed to direct our focus to reorganize the ecosystem for the new challenges we are facing, and not to prepare for the celebration of past results. After all, it was time to join hands and support each other to overcome this crisis.
In this sense, in March, we launched the Covid-19 Super Challenge | Coronavirus, in which we make our challenge launching platform available free of charge for companies, governments and civil society to share their demands for innovation to face the crisis. So, after interacting with more than 1,200 startups and around 120 entities that are adding efforts to overcome this moment, we decided to make some important decisions:
» We postponed the ranking of Ranking 100 Open Startups until the new date of Whow! Innovation Festival, which now takes place from 10 to 12 November. We will also extend, for startups, the registration and declaration period of contracts until August 15, 2020. With that, we will maintain the original plans to carry out the official award during this great event, and we will have a more updated picture of the innovation ecosystem in 2020 , including relationships established during the pandemic period.
»We will hold Digital Oiweeks in July, August and September, and further expand our efforts to highlight cases, opportunities and challenges of innovation, in addition to Speed-Dating Digital, to help keep the wheel spinning and business going.
» During Oiweek Digital in August, we will announce the result of the TOP Open Corps category , which lists the companies that have most engaged with startups, and, in the September edition, of the TOP Ecosystem and TOP Investors categories . We decided to carry out these announcements before the festival to recognize those who remain as great partners in the innovation ecosystem, generating business opportunities, and to encourage these entities to continue playing this very important role for startups, especially at this time. The startups and winners of the other categories of the Ranking 100 Open Startups 2020 — TOP 100 Startups , TOP Categories, Special Categories and TOP Evaluators — will be announced and awarded during the Whow! Innovation Festival in November.
» We launched an own fund of R $ 5 million to leverage the investment, with the network of investors, in up to 25 startups of the program, from July, until the end of the year.
These have been and will continue to be months of hard work, not only for 100 Open Startups, but for all of us. Around here, we will take even more our mission to help the economy flow, facilitating and strengthening the connections between companies and startups to promote and move the innovation ecosystem! Thus, we opted for actions that stimulate the market and we understand that these decisions will have a more positive impact for startups and the entire innovation ecosystem than the disclosure of the Ranking 100 Open Startups at this time.
We are sure that we have enough strength and maturity in our ecosystem to seek ways and solutions to reinvent ourselves, support ourselves and, thus, leave this moment strengthened. It is in periods like this that we are living that great innovators are forged, and we are all innovators by nature!
Keep counting on 100 Open Startups on your journey.
Team 100 Open Startups
