In this interview, entrepreneur and CPA Australia Michal Wasserbauer draws on more than 15 years of experience building businesses across Southeast Asia to explain why the Czech Republic has the foundations for a thriving innovation ecosystem.
At Techsylvania in Cluj-Napoca, the CEO of SPARK, Sharjah's Research, Technology and Innovation park, made the case for partnership over competition, explained the role of government vision for attracting world-class talent, and was candid about what European founders get wrong about the Gulf.
"I found someone who was a better entrepreneur than me, who was more visionary… I was like, man, I would love to work for you.” The story of how Gabriel Dymowski left his company to build AI hardware startup Pocket, which just raised €9.65M ($11M) led by Accel.
From e-voting to unicorns, Estonia has become a global innovation success story. But according to Startup Estonia's Vaido Mikheim, the next chapter will depend on turning research into companies, scaling deep tech, and thinking beyond national borders.
“When researchers come to us, it doesn’t start with a negotiation,” Viktor Olsson of KTH Innovation explains. Here’s how Sweden’s founder-friendly university model is creating a deep tech powerhouse and what CEE can learn from it.
Treating emerging markets as a monolith is a costly mistake. Utopia’s Alina Truhina explains how to leverage strategic arbitrage between emerging markets and GCC, and why local nuance is the ultimate sourcing advantage.
LAUNCHub Ventures has appointed Zagreb-based Vedran Blagus as its new associated partner, tasked with leading the firm’s expansion across Croatia, Slovenia, and the Western Balkans. "I want to be the first person in the region founders call," he says.
Sofia-based DSS powers the invisible tech behind banks, telecoms, and national schools. As ServiceNow experts, they prioritize strategic partnership over simple vending. From BP to their aIDentix platform, DSS proves that Eastern Europe’s technical hunger is a formidable global edge.
AI researcher Emily Kate Genatowski and her robot Tova are testing the limits of modern society. Through "tangible confrontations," she reveals that the biggest hurdles for humanoid robots are bureaucratic and legal, not technical. Is the world ready for the future?
