BY INVITATION ONLY. Please contact magnus@nordiccentre.net if you are interested in taking part.

Organized with Umeå University, Aarhus University, Fudan University, and Nordic-China Startup Forum, among others

Being home to some of the world's youngest and fastest growing startup scenes (e.g. Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen), China holds great potential as a setting for insightful entrepreneurship and innovation research, both from a practical and theoretical perspective. Over the past decades, China has seen rapid growth, technological development and a sharp increase in private venture capital investments. This has created a vast range of opportunities for budding entrepreneurs. With growing

government support, successful startup stories (e.g. Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu) and access to a huge

internal market, entrepreneurship as a possible career path has started to gain popularity in China. This is made evident by recent years’ explosive growth of co-working spaces, incubators and accelerators aimed at supporting startup companies.

In comparison, the Nordics have developed a strong tradition of entrepreneurship and innovation over the past century. Despite being small economies geographically far away from financial centers,

the Nordic countries are highly regarded as innovative startup nations. They rank consistently high on favorable conditions for entrepreneurs and produce the highest number of “unicorns” per capita

in Europe.

The two regions thus exemplify successful startup nations but with very different environmental

conditions. Combining insights from both environments can both increase generalizability of

knowledge and deepen our understanding of the specific characteristics of each environment and

implications for entrepreneurs and innovators who attempt to navigate them. Despite the great potential for synergies between Nordic and Chinese entrepreneurship and innovation research, such collaborations are relatively few and sporadic. This project aims to establish closer ties between Nordic and Chinese entrepreneurship and innovation scholars by showcasing the potential value of cross-country data collection and comparative studies in these fields. Reviewers in entrepreneurship journals frequently call for, or even insist on, cross-country comparisons to strengthen research findings. It is the hope of the organizers that this project can build a foundation for further international research collaborations, and thereby pave the way for high-quality studies and impactful research.

Planned activities - TBC

10:00 – 10:45 Welcoming talk and introduction

10:45 – 11:00 Coffee break/mingle

11:00 – 12:00 Research presentations

12:00 – 13:00 Lunch

13:00 – 14:00 Workshop on opportunities and challenges of China-Nordic entrepreneurship and

innovation research

14:00 – 14:15 Coffee break/mingle

14:15 – 15:00 Closing discussions