The advantages stemming from good collaboration between startups and corporates can be enormous. However, despite the clear benefits, there are still a large number of incumbents who struggle to do this right or, more worryingly, who haven’t entered in this space yet.

To promote role models and best practices of successful corporate-startup collaboration, advisory firm Mind the Bridge and innovation foundation Nesta, are launching the second edition of  Europe’s Corporate Startup Stars, a European ranking of startup-friendly corporates. The scheme takes place under the European Commission’s Startup Europe Partnership (SEP) initiative.

Judges will award companies that have gone the extra mile to establish mutually-beneficial partnerships with startups – whether through favorable procurement terms, partnerships, accelerators, direct investment, mentoring, intrapreneurship schemes, competitions or other dedicated internal programmes. The expert panel includes Sherry Coutu, author of The Scale-up Report and angel investor.

We are calling upon startups, scale-ups, startup supporting organisations, mentors, and those who have witnessed examples of good corporate-startup collaboration to speak up and nominate the corporates that are offering the most effective support. Self-nominations are not considered, but we do encourage corporates who believe they are eligible for the ranking to ask their startup network to nominate them. Last year nominations were crowdsourced in a similar way and over 100 nominations were received.

You can nominate your startup-friendly corporates here!

In order to be assessed by the high-level panel of judges, the nominated corporates need to have engaged with at least one European startup.

The deadline is Wednesday 12 April 2017 and the top 25 ranking, along with special prizes, will be revealed in autumn 2017.