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December 2019

Toyota Motor Europe launches the Toyota Startup Awards to find most innovative solutions to improve “Mobility for All” 1024 512 IMPACT Accelerator

Toyota Motor Europe launches the Toyota Startup Awards to find most innovative solutions to improve “Mobility for All”

Toyota and ISDI Accelerator launch The Toyota Startup Awards

  • The Toyota Startup Awards will take place at the 4YFN event in Barcelona, from 24 to 26 February 2020
  • Eight selected startups will participate in a pitching competition to try to win the main prize — a fast track to the Toyota Accelerator Program, powered by ISDI Accelerator
  • Toyota is looking for the most innovative solutions in the fields of Inclusive Mobility, Accessibility and Disruptive Mobility to contribute to its goal of offering “Mobility for All”
  • The competition ties in with Toyota’s global call to “Start Your Impossible”, the belief that when people are free to move, anything is possible

Brussels, December 20, 2019 – Toyota Motor Europe (TME) and Business school ISDI, through ISDI Accelerator, have created the Toyota Startup Awards. This competition targets inclusive mobility companies that offer innovative solutions empowering people with a physical impairment to move around more freely and facilitating their daily life. Eight startups will be invited to attend 4YFN in Barcelona from 24 to 26 February 2020 to exhibit their products or services in the Toyota stand and participate in a pitch competition in front of a specialized panel of jurors selected by TME. The winners will be awarded a fast track to the Toyota Accelerator Program, powered by ISDI Accelerator.

Interested startups can apply between December 20 and January 26. One of the main criteria is that applicants must focus on the following three fields:

  • Socially inclusive mobility: Mobility solutions that are created to meet the unfulfilled mobility needs of people with a physical impairment, elderly and children, as well as people living in suburban areas.
  • Accessibility: Provide innovative approaches that increase the accessibility to mobility solutions and thereby enable a “Mobility for All” future.
  • Disruptive Mobility: Development of new products, services, tools, technologies and / or disruptive business models that can contribute to a “Mobility for All” future.

A jury formed by experts from TME and ISDI Accelerator will choose among the applications a maximum of eight projects that will become finalists for the Toyota Startup Awards and join Toyota at 4YFN. The selected startups will benefit from:

  • Free booth space in Toyota’s stand at 4YFN during the three days of the event to showcase their innovative product or solution.
  • An exclusive time slot on the Toyota stage at 4YFN to pitch their solution.
  • Exposure to event visitors, investors and Toyota executives.
  • Access to MWC Barcelona on Thursday 27th February 2020 for their startup team.
  • Accommodation during the 4YFN event for two members of the startup team.
  • The opportunity to win a fast track to the Toyota Startup Accelerator, powered by ISDI Accelerator that will offer training, mentoring, brokerage with private investors as well as potential future collaboration with TME.

The winners of the Toyota Startup Awards will be announced by Toyota on the main stage of 4YFN on 25 February 2020.

Toyota’s “Start Your Impossible” global corporate story conveys the message that when people are free to move, anything is possible. Toyota believes that mobility goes beyond cars; it is about overcoming limitations. In this spirit our mission is to provide freedom of movement for everyone. Our vision is to offer integrated mobility solutions to everyone, including those with physical impairments, ensuring a more open and inclusive society that allows people to challenge their potential.

Startups are invited to apply via the dedicated website:

Toyota Startup Awards

About Toyota Motor Europe

Toyota Motor Europe NV/SA (TME) oversees the wholesale sales and marketing of Toyota and Lexus vehicles, parts and accessories, and Toyota’s European manufacturing and engineering operations. Toyota directly employs around 20,000 people in Europe and has invested over EUR 9 billion since 1990. Toyota’s operations in Europe are supported by a network of 29 National Marketing and Sales Companies across 53 countries, a total of around 3,000 sales outlets, and nine manufacturing plants. In 2018, Toyota sold 1,035,430 Toyota and Lexus vehicles in Europe. For more information, visit www.toyota-europe.com

About ISDI Accelerator

ISDI Accelerator was born in 2014 with the objective of channelling the entrepreneurial interest of the ISDI students and to boost and professionalize the startup market in Europe. Their first startup acceleration program, IMPACT, marked a milestone in the continent thanks to the collaboration between public entities, corporations, educational entities, investors and, of course, startups. Since then they have developed dozens of incubation and acceleration programs, they have created, trained and accelerated hundreds of startups, and thousands of companies have already applied to their programs. ISDI Accelerator is part of ISDI Digital Business School.

Toyota Startup Awards

Press Details

Alexandra Carrasco Szulc
Communications Manager – ISDI Accelerator
E-mail: acarrasco@isdi.education

More about ISDI/IMPACT

We are in the middle of our rebranding, soon we will have a new website where we will inform about all that is happening in ISDI Accelerator, before known as IMPACT 🙂
Estamos en mitad de nuestro rebranding, pronto tendremos nueva web a través de la cual os informaremos de todo lo que está pasando en ISDI Accelerator, antes conocido como IMPACT 🙂

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¿Te ha gustado esta historia? Suscríbete a nuestra Newsletter para estar informado de lo último que está ocurriendo en ISDI Accelerator. Convocatorias, vacantes, oportunidades para startups ¡y mucho más!

Softlanding in Spain: ISDI Accelerator helped three Korean startups in their first step to know the Spanish market 800 533 IMPACT Accelerator

Softlanding in Spain: ISDI Accelerator helped three Korean startups in their first step to know the Spanish market

Softlanding in Spain: ISDI Accelerator helped three Korean startups in their first step to know the Spanish market

As Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, says, starting a company is like “jumping off a cliff and building an airplane on the way down.” It’s hard. Really really hard! Being an entrepreneur itself can be the loneliest journey already, not to mention take this adventure to a different destination where you’ll find a completely different business culture, ecosystem…

Thanks to the trust of Kotra, Korean Trade-Investment Promotion Agency, ISDI Accelerator launched its first softlanding program in Spain, helping three Korean tech startups, DoubleMe, Dtonic and 12CM, to tread water in their business adventure into the Spanish market. Softlanding is a pre-journey of expanding the business of startups in mature stage to a foreign market. With softlanding services, a startup will be able to touch base on the establishment conditions, business culture, investment and startups ecosystem.

The program is designed to familiarice the Korean startups with the western European business norms, regulation and fundraising processes and startup ecosystem. To ensure a balance between comprehensive coverage of information and the customized advisory services based on the different industry and business model of each startup, ISDI accelerator invited four high calibre and experienced speakers to cover essential topics in softlanding in Spain that will strengthen their knowledge of the European market. On top of it, an immersive, fully-tailored mentoring sessions are put in place to help the startups gain knowledge of the ecosystem’s establishment conditions, industry norm, targeted stakeholder mapping, potential local clients via hands-on support from matched local mentors.

The full courses program overview:

Mentor matching is one of ISDI Accelerator key assets. We contact startups to have first-hand information to understand startups business needs in grain detail. Then, we search in our mentor database, which currently has 140 + active mentors of C-suite, series successful entrepreneurs, etc. We make sure the selected mentor has the right industry background, matched professional expertise, high-level of passion and engagement to help the startup and the potential to introduce and open business opportunities for the mentee. We believe the carefully matched mentor will give startups the support they need to grow their network, gain traction, incorporate into Spanish business ecosystem and engage with investors.

Some interesting business culture takeaway from the Spanish and Korean business worlds:

  • Time: Don’t stress too much about timing, business meetings tend to be punctual. But if you happen to have to wait for your potential business partner to arrive. 
  • Last minute changes: if you are working with a Spanish investment firm, don’t get too surprised if your contract is changed several times at the last minute.
  • Lunch and breakfast and drinks: beautiful opportunities of talking about cooperation and partnership.

About the three Korean Startups:

12CM: The echoss platform is an O2O service platform and provides offline to mobile connection services. It is composed of: physical stamp to be exhibited on site, the certification center and the information center. The use cases can range from stamp card, promotion, voucher, gift card, point card, payment, paper stamp… 

Dtonic: Dtonic Inc. specializes in Spatio-temporal Big Data based on GIS + ICT Technology. Spatio-temporal big data is the data objects or elements that have geographical information present and can be expressed in dimensions such as GPS coordinates.

Doubleme: The HoloPortal™ Studio captures the magic and motion of real people or pets in real-time, from multiple camera angles. With propriety algorithm technology recreating a highly accurate 3D model of the live performance. Imagine holographic mixed reality experiences you can feel and be the content, it’s now a reality with DoubleMe.

About ISDI Accelerator

ISDI Accelerator is born in 2014 with the objective of channeling the entrepreneurial interest of the ISDI students and to boost and professionalize the startup market in Europe. Our first startup acceleration program, IMPACT, marked a milestone in the continent thanks to the collaboration between public entities, corporations, educational entities, investors and, of course, startups.

Since then we have developed dozens of incubation and acceleration programs, we have created, trained and accelerated hundreds of startups, and thousands of companies have already applied to our programs.

All this has led us to be listed in the top positions of the European and global rankings as one of the most important accelerators in Europe, and in 2019 one of our programs (IMPACT Connected Car) was chosen as the best startup acceleration project of 2019 by the European Commission.

But we don’t do it alone. We are accompanied by our parent company, ISDI, and also hundreds of mentors, teachers and experts, the best investors in Europe, our partners and colleagues in the different acceleration programs and the corporations and institutions we work with.

For more information

Xianshu Zeng,
Project Manager ISDI Accelerator
Phone: (+43) 900 814 144
Email: xzeng@isdi.education

More about ISDI/IMPACT

We are in the middle of our rebranding, soon we will have a new website where we will inform about all that is happening in ISDI Accelerator, before known as IMPACT 🙂

Liked this post? Subscribe to our newsletter and stay on top of the latest ISDI Accelerator news. Open calls, job postings, opportunities for startups, and more!

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