NEC Innovation Challenge 2023

ABOUT NEC Innovation Challenge (NIC)

NEC Innovation Challenge (NIC) is the global open innovation event for all startups around the world organized by NEC. Last year, the application began in September 2022, and we had received 324 applications from global startups. At the Final Event, 10 startups won the prizes after the careful deliberations by the judges of NEC, sponsors and partners.

This year, NIC will be different from last year’s. The most important purpose of this event is to produce feasible co-creating projects through investigating the real on-site problems and pain points. In addition, this is a great business chance for global startups to develop their business into a feasible business with sponsors, partners and NEC. Please don’t miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!

Our first NEC Innovation Challenge in 2022

Purpose

NEC aims to utilize its own and partner companies' assets to create significant joint businesses with promising startups worldwide. To achieve this goal, NEC Innovation Challenge solicits ideas from startups worldwide and accelerates the development of new businesses for NEC and its partner companies. The inaugural NEC Innovation Challenge 2022 focused on three themes: Healthcare & Life Sciences, Carbon Neutrality, and Metaverse, with the goal of forming collaborative projects with startups.

Result

The interest in this challenge was high, with 324 applications from 66 countries. After screening and the final event, four collaborative projects were ultimately formed. Discussions have begun with Deepbrain AI (South Korea) on NEC's Metaverse business and PoC execution, with branding support from Dentsu Inc. (Japan's largest advertising company) as one of the partner companies. Energiency (France) has begun hands-on support for Japan service deployment through the BIRD Initiative (business, technology, intellectual property, and funding). NEC X has started technology matching with NEC researchers and hands-on support providing to eventually provide its venture studio programs (hands-on support from advanced technology, funding, and various experts) to support business growth for WeWALK (UK). Finally, Threedy (Germany) has begun discussions on the potential for investment with NEC Orchestrating Future Fund (NOFF), an ecosystem-type CVC fund.

 

"NEC Orchestrating Future Fund (NOFF)"

“NEC Orchestrating Future Fund (NOFF)" is a corporate venture capital (CVC) fund aiming to drive the ecosystems required to create social value through collaboration with customers and partners, and to promote new external services, knowledge and technologies.

NEC believes that the evolution of network technology and the transformation of digital services will drive the creation of new social value. The CVC fund will invest in both technology and services, and aim to maximize the investment by generating synergies. In addition, NEC will work to accelerate new business development activities by building ecosystems with corporate enterprises and portfolio startups.

The fund has six areas of focus - 5G/6G, Digital Government/Digital Finance, Smart City, DX, Healthcare and Life Sciences, and Carbon Neutral.

Please see here for more details.