Poland is making its first steps towards an economy based on innovation. This switch is a key element to maintain the rapid development that Poland has been experiencing from over the past 25 years. Will the growing number of great Polish start-ups and the significantly increasing number of patent applications from Poland to the European Patent Office push Poland to make the big step forward faster?
The image and facts
Poland has a very good image and in fact it is a modern, fast-developing EU country, a reliable business partner, number one investment magnet in CEE and an rising exports star. Polish companies are among top technological players in Central Europe. For instance, in the recent Deloitte's Technology Fast 50. Powerful connections report, 17 out of 50 CEE companies listed in the report have Polish origins. This is the absolute record regarding the number of winners from one country. Poland-based Comperia financial products comparison website was rank by Deloitte as the second fastest growing technological company in the CEE region with the revenue growth reaching impressive 1,962% over the last five years.
The success of Comperia is not a surprise, as according to the Forbes Creative in Business 2015 ranking, the internet-related and new technologies sectors are said to have the biggest potential for Polish business. This is also the best area for Polish start-up development. Today, Poland is experiencing an explosion of start-ups based on great inventions and innovative ideas that can be turned into profitable success. Poland is one of the most active countries on the European start-up map. IT and newly established new technology companies account for the largest share of the three million companies registered in Poland.
Time for Polish start-ups
Let's look at some examples of briliant start – ups from Poland. One of them is Smimmo – a smart device for swimmers that replaces a personal swimming trainer. It programmes a training session based on measurement of the distance, pace, amount of calories burned as well as the time spent in water. It even allows the results to be shared on social media and on popular sports websites, including RunKeeper.com. Swimmo has been co-financed through world's most popular crowdfunding platform Kickstarter.com. It almost tripled the founding goal of $39,000. Other Polish smart invention that made a huge success on Kickstarter.com is Sher.ly box. This is a personal data cloud that allows data collecting on one's own storage cloud. The device has no storage or data type limits. The project was helped into existance by 896 backers who pledged $154,106 in just four days.
Poland is also the place where DICE+ has been invented. This interactive dice is used as an accessory for playing games on tablets instead of traditional boards. DICE+ has introduced a completely new approach to the idea of on-line board games, as it combines the 'magical moment' of throwing a real dice on a virtual board. This device, made by Game Technologies, is now offered in Apple stores around the world!
Another technology for which Poland is becoming famous is 3D printing. Every 10 proffessional 3D printer is manufactured in Poland! Experts say that by 2020 Europe will become the global leader in this unique technology allowing printing whatever our imagination can come up with, including spare parts of human body for medical purposes. Now, this relatively new sector is becoming a Polish speciality, with Zortax 3D Printer as one of the global leaders of the industry. Just a year after launching in 2013, Zortrax received the order for 5,000 printers from Dell. And this year, in April, the Zortrax M200 was named the best out of 400 desktop 3D printers in the world by 3D Hubs.
Other great inventions — for the aeronautics, space, automotive, chemical and energy industries are being created in R&D centres in Poland. Some of them have been established in the country by foreign investors, some are developed by Poland-based companies as Oskar Zienta's Prozessdesign studio that created a unique Fidu technology of air-blown metal elements that will be probably used by NASA on Mars to build an astronautic base there. So now it is obvious where to live on Mars, but how to move around that planet? Polish scientists are also solving this problem. For several years, students from Poland are winning contests to construct the best Mars rovers in the world. Polish technical universities all over the country also design highly advances elements of spaceships and probes.
The results of all this activity is reflected in the patent applications. According to Crido Taxand's report from May 2015, Poland has the record number of patent applications in Central Eastern Europe. In 2014, the European Patent Office registered 475 patents from Poland — the Czech Republic was in second place, registering 167 patents.
Breaking the wall
The examples of innovativeness show that Polish companies and institutions — especially'"the smart freshers' – have a huge potential to be a powerhouse of national innovativeness, despite the perception that Poland is as a country developing its innovativeness slowly. It is due to the profile of a Polish economy based, until recently, on the inflow of technology from abroad and on SMEs that usually are overly cautious about carrying out high-risk and expensive R&D activity, or who simply can't afford doing it.
This image soon might be changed if Polish entrepreneurs develop long-term partnerships with local science centres to create their own and unique know-how, as well as learning how to use various types of grants for that purposes. EU funds from the 2014-2020 budget promote the development of innovativeness. If Poland maintains the level of innovation development and learns how to effectively protect its smart ideas through international patent offices, it may soon compete with other European leaders of innovativeness.
A smart concept and the right to make a profit from it — this is what matters today!
Source: BPCC by Polish Information and Investment Agency (PAIiIZ)
