What You Need to Know about the AsiaBerlin Summit 2021
Formerly Asia-Pacific Week Berlin, now, AsiaBerlin Summit has grown bigger and better with the unique platform it provides to enable in-depth discussion, foster innovation, value-sharing, co-creation, and capacity building by bringing diverse stakeholders together in an interconnected manner.
For the second year, the summit was held in a hybrid format to reach a wider audience and adhere to the COVID-19 regulations and restrictions. This summit had 5 focus areas: Internationalization, Female Entrepreneurship/Diversity/LGBTQI+ topics, Social Entrepreneurship, Smart City, Urban Tech, Green Tech, Climate Tech, and Fintech. Topics such as healthtech, smart cities and blockchain were covered during satellite events. Similar to last year, the hybrid audience was spread across different time zones and locations. Remote attendees were enabled to interact with the live panels by platforms like Slido and Brella.
The Summit had a series of panels dedicated exclusively to discussing opportunities and collaborations with India, China and Japan. Specialized Embassy Series with representation from the embassies of Indonesia, Vietnam, Pakistan, Srilanka and South Korea were also part of the Summit. Following up on last year’s success, an exclusive Investors’ Day was organized this year as well with venture capitalists, family offices, and business angels from Asia and Germany participating to align perspectives and expand opportunities through discussions with the startups in the audience. This event was followed by an intimate investor’s dinner to enable cultivation of personal connections and networks among investors and founders. The investor’s panel included notable participants such as Bo Ji from China Start & Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB), Tony Á Verb of Carbonless Asia, Rabab Nasrallah, PhD of early Bird Venture Capital, Varun Sridhar of Paytm Money and Janie Yu of LFX Venture Partners.
The conference was opened with a breakfast meeting with Deputy Governing Mayor of Berlin, Ramona Pop. This was followed by an opening address by Dr. Rainer Seider. Dr. Rainer shared the vision of AsiaBerlin, encouraging German startups to invest in Asia and highlighting the opportunities that Asian startups have to expand to Germany, particularly Berlin.
Why the AsiaBerlin Summit?
The world is continuously evolving and there are new issues every year that require our collective, global attention to tackle, such as – sustainability, climate change, gender empowerment and social entrepreneurship. Value exchange by corporates, investors and startups holds the key to aligning innovation with development for a better world for all.
The very first panel of the summit traversed several such important domains. The opening panel with Cedrik Neike of SIEMENS, Thomas Saueressig of SAP SE, Tina Nayak of Useristics and Nina Pütz of Ratepay GmbH brought forward the need and potential for sustainable revolution through fruitful collaborations as facilitated by the Summit.
Through the week of AsiaBerlin Summit 2021, there were focussed panels addressing female to male gender gap and LGBTQIA+ inclusion in the tech startup world, innovative collaborations between startups and corporates to promote innovation and co-creation and also the role of governments and policies to facilitate internationalization across different Asian countries and Germany.
AsiaBerlin space has developed into a forum to establish a synergy between different players and drive innovation together. We are very grateful for our team at AsiaBerlin, enpact and our other partners who strive continuously to make this space more exciting and purposeful every year.
Interested in learning more? Take a look at the official summit hashtag: #ABS2021 on Linkedin for diverse perspectives and enjoy a detailed recap on this year’s AsiaBerlin Summit on the AsiaBerlin blog. Stay tuned across our social media channels to be the first to know about how to take part in next year’s summit.
