An effective marketing tool we have used over the past few months has been hosting different information sessions around the country called VilCap Mondays. These have be effective because we end up engaging a considerable amount of targeted networking, marketing, and outreach within each city, culminating with an informal event. I wrote about our first event in Rotterdam in a previous post, now I’ll do my best to summarize the VilCap Mondays we have had since and highlight a few of the more interesting attendees.
VilCap Monday-Eindhoven
Eindhoven is best known for being the headquarters of Philips (the electronics company). With it’s roots in technology, it has become a breading ground for many different tech startups. In fact, several organizations (including one called Brainport Development) are trying to make Eindhoven the “Silicon Valley of the EU.” While the city appears to have a growing ecosystem designed to support tech startups, limited support exists for social entrepreneurs. VilCap Monday-Eindhoven, hosted at Igluu (a beautiful co-working space in an old Philip lightbulb manufacturing plant), attracted an array of professionals in tech startups or related field.
One of the more interesting social enterprises that attended was Rural Spark. They are creating small-scale, decentralized, distributed, renewable energy grids in rural India. Rural electrification has become an issue that many companies are trying to address in India and many other emerging markets.
Here are some pictures from the event!
VilCap Monday-Utrecht
Next stop was Utrecht, hosted by Utrecht Inc. at their great facility. Utrecht Inc. is a start-up incubator and, while they are located at Utrecht University, they help people bring alive their business concepts, regardless of whether or not they are students or faculty.
This event was successful in attracting attention to Village Capital, but we discovered that most of the attendees were actually with a company designed support entrepreneurs. It was great to see different groups trying to promote entrepreneurship in Utrecht, such as the Economic Board, but we were hoping to see a few more entrepreneurs.
One of the more promising companies was Phytonext, which has developed a more efficient means for extracting vitamins and minerals from plant matter. Another was 1miljoenwatt, which has created a crowdfunding platform for community solar projects in The Netherlands.
Here are a few pictures:
Stay tuned for more on VilCap Mondays in Enschede and Amsterdam…