Meet central Europe's hi-tech world-beater, South Moravia

Meet central Europe's hi-tech world-beater, South Moravia
By Robert Hackwill
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There's a new Hi-Tech gang in town making a global name for themselves, busting out of South Moravia in the Czech Republic on a wave of entreprenurial savvy and smart support.

This Business planet is special, a runaway success story for hi-tech entrepreneurs in the Czech Republic’s second city Brno. South Moravia is central Europe’s silicon valley.

Regional innovation strategies

  • Regional innovation strategies enable regions to fully capitalize on their competitive strengths and talents, attract investment and reach global markets.
  • As part of the South Moravian regional innovation strategy, the innovation centre JIC supports innovative businesses – it provides advice, helps companies find partners, get funding and grow.
  • Since 2003, companies supported by JIC created more than 1,500 new jobs.
  • JIC is part of the Enterprise Europe Network that helps ambitious SMEs innovate and expand internationally in the EU and beyond by providing advice and partnership services. The network offers 3,000 experts across 600 member organisations in more than 60 countries.

Useful links

This economic flowering has in part been made possible by smart support provided by Jindřich Weiss’s regional Innovation Centre, the JIC, where he is the Business Innovation Team Manager.

“Since 2003, the JIC has helped to create more than 1,500 hi-tech jobs in more than 200 companies.”

And not just any companies. Some have conquered the world, like Flowmon.

Meet a company boss who is sitting pretty, but not standing still. Rostislav Vocilka’s company has only gone and come up with one of the more notable advances in digital security in recent years.

The innovation goes beyond traditional firewall and anti-virus protection with an additional layer of bespoke digital network analysis that detects anomalies and reduces exposure to attack.

This is a hot property, and is today sold to 600 clients around the world.

“We are proud to be the only European company recognized from 20 world wide IT companies in Magic Quadrants from Gartner in our sector. This is very prestigious for our clients and this is like being the only European restaurant with Michelin stars”, he says proudly.

The company is a spinoff, created 10 years ago when the region’s centres of higher technical education pooled technology and people, seeding the region with talented, ambitious startups.

Today it has a workforce of 80 people and counts on recruiting another 40 over the next three years.

With the JIC as incubator, Flowmon gets support for personalised training and a range of services that eases the passage from the prototype stage to having a market-ready product.

“The JIC is helping us to find the right contacts to answer our questions,” explains Vocilka, “such as: how to develop on-line marketing, how to manage HR, how to develop the business in foreign countries and so on.”

Jindřich Weiss puts the region’s secret down to the fact that it has found a way to create an efficient, resource-rich enviroment for business.

“There is high concentration of business actors in South Moravia, and our secret is to know how to organize a strong network built on long term relationships,” he says.

That has allowed a sort of great leap forward in competitivity for the region’s high-tech entrepreneurs. Suddenly South Moravia is standing tall on the world stage for high-tech.

The JIC is part of the European Union’s highly successful Enterprise Europe Network, which connects to 600 other organisations in 60 countries in Europe and around the world. Jindřich recognises how useful its help has been.

“Absolutely! It opens doors for our clients to partners from all over the world, and it enables us to export our system to different foreign countries such as Germany, Austria or Spain.”

For more information go to Business Planet’s webpage, our social media network, and watch out for out next report.

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