By Ole Jani, Dietrich Von Klaeden and Marc Lemcke
Transatlantic collaboration faces many challenges, no need to name them again here. From the beginning we tried to focus on the opportunities in working across the Atlantic by focusing on tangible results in an area that matters now and going forward: Entrepreneurship. There are probably only a few topic where collaboration and knowledge exchange make more sense, in particular among cities in the US and Europe.
Panel discussion at the TEP 2013 conference, December 5th
Cities like New York and Berlin, for example, face similar challenges and have to be pragmatic in providing economic opportunities. With a “design-do-iterate” approach, we aim to bring people and institutions together to create concrete results that benefit both regions.
From the very beginning in 2010, the American Council on Germany, the German Consul General in New York, and Union Square Ventures have supported this initiative when nothing like this had ever existed and the benefits were not yet tangible. Now, concrete initiatives are under way. For instance, the Berlin Senator for Economics, Research and Technology, Cornelia Yzer, and Brooklyn Borough President Eric L. Adams will sign an agreement enabling clean tech companies to expand faster and cheaper in the US. Also, the German American Chamber of Commerce will launch a new on-boarding program for German companies coming to the US. And there are more initiatives in the works.
Where do we go from here? True to our open and collaborative approach, we would like to invite interested people and institutions to work with us to foster more entrepreneurial cross-border collaboration that will benefit both sides of the Atlantic. What TEP has been able to do with the tremendous support of our partners has convinced us that small city project teams can generate significant results. We want to create a small project team that helps to accelerate existing projects and initiate new cross-border collaboration throughout the year. We would like to invite you to help take TEP to the next level.