L’Oréal discovered the best of Sweden together with Ignite Sweden and RISE

“The Sweden Innovation Week was the first e-learning expedition that we organized with Open Innovation, with the support of RISE and Ignite, to discover the Swedish innovation ecosystem. The purpose was to have an in-depth vision of its ecosystem, how it operates, how we can match with some of L’Oréal’s strategies, and who were the relevant actors that we should meet,” explains Céline Farcet, Head of Technology Scouting Europe at L’Oréal.

During four days, the team digitally met incubators, selected startups and leading research facilities to connect and explore joint opportunities.

“There are at least two benefits during this tour virtually online. The first one is the opportunity to meet many different locations in the same week, which has never been possible in real life. And secondly exposing these meetings to relevant parties at the customer. Seeing the number of participants from the L’Oréal side, it has been truly rewarding,” reflects Peter Alberius, Head of International Business Development at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden.

“Beauty is moving fast in a tech direction, that is why we are really open to interacting with deeptech startups. We are eager to evaluate what startups can do for us,” says Ivan Rodriguez, Global Open Innovation Director at L’Oréal.

Ignite Sweden’s Program Manager Stina Lantz thinks that the virtual tour gave Swedish startups the unique opportunity to meet the beauty multinational corporation and was happily surprised by the commitment shown by its Open Innovation team.

“We know by experience that the more people engaged in the first meeting with the startups, the higher probabilities that the two companies start a collaboration after the meeting. For us that was also a huge part of the success of these sessions,” says Stina.