
Going Full Circle: The Ultimate Guide to a Regenerative Economy
March 22, 2023
Regenerative Economy is a relatively new concept that is gaining popularity as the solution to the exponential population growth we are experiencing. It focuses on restoring and rebuilding by following the principle of circularity, which aims to minimise waste and maximise resource use efficiency. For those new to the concept, let us walk you through the basic concepts for a better understanding.


Camila Ugarte
Communications & Marketing Intern

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Save the Date: March 25th 2023, 8:30pm
March 20, 2023
Earth Hour is more than just an hour of darkness. It is a symbol of unity and a call to action for a sustainable future. Together, we can make a difference and create a brighter and healthier future for ourselves and future generations. This Earth Hour, let's come together to show our commitment towards the planet we call home!


Camila Ugarte
Communications & Marketing Intern

The Roots of Flavour: Exploring Culinary Traditions with Zina Abboud
March 8, 2023
This International Women's Day, we caught up with one of our female entrepreneurs from the WorldStartup community. Her story is as inspiring as her venture - Leaves by Roots. Discover how they're tackling income inequality, building bridges across cultures and improving the food system.


Camila Ugarte
Communications & Marketing Intern

Rebuilding Ukraine by Supporting Startups
March 6, 2023
What is the current state of the startup ecosystem in Ukraine? Our colleague, Svitlana Krystenko discussed her views and presented key steps for its development during her speech at the Futurepreneurs for Ukraine Kick-off event in Vilnius. Read more about her story in this article.


Svitlana Khrystenko
Innovation Project Manager and Service Designer

How can innovation hubs transform physical spaces into storytellers of their mission, values, and accomplishments
Give Your Spaces a Voice
February 23, 2023
How do you tell a story about the mission, vision, and accomplishments of an innovation hub within its physical space? Olga Royenko and Alissa Bankovska from Voice of Space searched for answers to these complex topics during WorldStartup's meetup at ImpactFest 2022. You can now read their report based on the outcome of the session.


Olga Royenko
Founder of Voice of Space

The 6th edition of Futurepreneurs: hands-on entrepreneurship training and focus on Ukraine
January 26, 2023
Futurepreneurs, a pre-accelerator programme that promotes sustainable entrepreneurship, is launching its sixth edition, this time focused on Ukrainian startups that will work on projects to rebuild Ukraine after the war.


Antanas Popiera
Startups Project Manager at Sunrise Valley Science

Lucy, Europe's first all-electric airline, featured at Startup Tuesday
December 23, 2022
During Startup Tuesday, on the 29th of November in The Hague, Teun Kraaij - the man behind Europe's first fully electric airline Lucy - shared his inspiring and personal story about his ambition, inspiration and motivation with an audience of fellow entrepreneurs.


Fabienne de Hilster

The Hackathon for Good The Hague #5 announced its winner!
November 30, 2022
The fifth edition of the Hackathon for Good has a new winner! Teams from all over the world worked for 48 hours straight to tackle today’s biggest challenges related to sustainability, privacy, open government and corruption.


Laurens Slats
Communication lead HFG

Kick-off Sustainable aviation challenges and opportunities a success!
November 2, 2022
The aviation industry is facing many challenges and opportunities in its journey toward a sustainable future. On Thursday, 20th of October, Transavia, Maeve and Zepp.Solutions shared their latest development and challenges during the Kick-off of the sustainable aviation Challenges & Opportunities Session.


Nature policy on the rooftops in Rotterdam
October 20, 2022
Rotterdam offers many alternative ways for its inhabitants to experience the city. Those who find walking on the sidewalk a boring activity can plan their next routes on the city's skyline. Adventurous strollers had the possibility to walk from roof to roof and across the Coolsingel. These walkways are placed on high scaffolding at various locations in the city. During this “Rooftop Walk,” you will come across sustainable, innovative, and creative ways to make roofs more inclusive in improving the quality of life in a city.


Mathis van der Voordt
Programme Support Intern

The Regenerative Economy. Your two cents, please.
October 17, 2022
Gerrit Jan discusses the concept of a regenerative economy. How does it differ from a traditional ESG framework? And more importantly, how can we make sure it becomes the new standard?


Gerrit Jan van 't Veen
Managing Director of WorldStartup Collective

Connecting with fellow change makers at Frankfurt's Impact Festival
October 7, 2022
In this personal note, Gerrit Jan recounts his experiences at the Impact Festival in Frankfurt and highlights some of the most inspiring impact entrepreneurs he encountered.


Gerrit Jan van 't Veen
Managing Director of WorldStartup Collective


Co-creation is key to innovation
September 15, 2022
We brought the community together at The Hague Tech on September 13 for an interactive session where all participants had a chance to share their ideas and collaborate with others who are enthusiastic about tech in government.


Svitlana Khrystenko
Innovation Project Manager and Service Designer

GovTech NL Holds First Roundtables Event in July
July 15, 2022
Five roundtables, five diverse topics and two speakers. This is how we launched the first in-person event for the GovTech community this summer. Read more about this event in this article by Svitlana Khrystenko, GovTech NL's communication manager.


Svitlana Khrystenko
Innovation Project Manager and Service Designer

Taking on the fight of waste plastic and affordable housing on a global level with ‘Conscious Designs’
July 8, 2022
During this project Rushabh was working on how to use plastic waste, which was abundant in Indonesia, and how to solve the issue of unsafe constructions.


Rushabh Chheda
Founder of UniBrick


A fruitful week: Organising a design sprint for Miro
June 3, 2022
WorldStartup is delighted to announce an interaction with the number one online visual collaboration platform “Miro”, also known as one of our favourite remote/hybrid facilitation tools.


Milena Ninova
Programme Design & Management, Workshop Facilitator



Governments' innovation starts with understanding your challenges
April 7, 2022
Daniël Steginga and Alwin Veldboom have supported the Municipality of The Hague with formulating a Challenge for Startup in Residence with the Worldstartup Challenge Discovery & Definition process.


Daniël Steginga
Managing Director of WorldStartup

1 Month Later: The Reality of Living through War in 2022
March 24, 2022
A story by Svitlana Khrystenko, a Ukrainian living in The Netherlands. In her story, she describes her personal experience with the recent war in Ukraine and how her family living there lives with it. In the end, she suggests practical steps each of us can take to support Ukraine.


Svitlana Khrystenko
Innovation Project Manager and Service Designer

Introducing startup Limo as a new member of the Basecamp programme
March 21, 2022
Limo was founded in 2021 by 4 young international team members. It all started with the passion to improve the quality of landscape and environment surrounding the greenhouses in The Netherlands. Later on, it grew into a concrete product that creates value for everyone in the horticulture ecosystem.


Svitlana Khrystenko
Innovation Project Manager and Service Designer

Evil minds that plot destruction
March 1, 2022
Our thoughts are with everyone who suffers from this terrible war that has been raging for almost a week. Our office and our Next Valley program is open for startups from Ukraine and Russia.


Svitlana Khrystenko
Innovation Project Manager and Service Designer

Startup Spotlight - Khach and Natalya from Scimagine
February 22, 2022
Khach and Natalya are co-founders of Scimagine, a startup which has developed an innovative cloud-based platform for categorised experimental data, structured and stored in the form of searchable databases. They joined the WorldStartup Altitude program in May. Here is an overview of their 2021 startup journey.


Khachatur Julfakyan
Founder of Scimagine

Infrascreen: nanotech solution offers greenhouse growers extra energy savings
February 22, 2022
The agro-ecosystem in the Netherlands is of great importance for innovations like the one of Infrascreen. Read how Frank & The Backs works with a network of seasoned professionals and C-level executives.

Egbert Ottevanger
Director Frank & the Backs

IMEC participant's story "Camptoo brings private campervan rental to Germany"
January 28, 2022
Camptoo is the platform for private individuals who want to rent a campervan or rent out their campervan safely. The popularity of his 'Airbnb on wheels' has ensured that founder Martijn Peeters now focuses on the enormous market potential in Germany.




Interview with James White
December 2, 2021
Climate Action Center is one of our newest Altitude startups that joined World Startup a few months ago. We are glad to introduce James, a co-founder of Climate Action Center, with whom we have had a very inspiring conversation.


James White
Founder of C.A.C.


Wrapping up Growing Green Cities Lab
November 11, 2021
Growing Green Cities Lab is a six-month programme organized jointly by SYNCHRO SPACE, the Embassy of the Netherlands in Ukraine, and WorldStartup. The main goal of the programme is to help the municipality of Rivne to solve its sustainable challenges by providing them with scouted solutions from Dutch and Ukrainian startups.


Svitlana Khrystenko
Innovation Project Manager and Service Designer

Inspiring BackTalks event
October 6, 2021
On September 27 the event BackTalks took place for the first time. The hybrid event, organized by Frank & the Backs, was a success: over 30 interested parties attended the live event in The Hague, almost 50 people worldwide were present online. The event was moderated by Bas van Werven, radio host at BNR Nieuwsradio. Plan is to organize BackTalks every quarter.


5G Smart Railway Hackathon - looking back and, always, forward
August 31, 2021
Celebrating the winning team Nife Labs and their smart AR solution, right before the start of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in July. The hackathon program was part of the 5G Railway Lab in Barcelona and it was fully designed and facilitated by the WorldStartup Lab unit.


Milena Ninova
Programme Design & Management, Workshop Facilitator



KJ Lab Challenge - How we did it
August 4, 2021
The Hague's population is growing and with that the number of bicycles. The number of bicycles left behind on the streets has risen over the past years. Additionally, parking garages are getting filled with old bicycles that lead to lack of space for active cyclists. WorldStartup, together with ANNA Vastgoed & Cultuur and The Municipality of The Hague, facilitated co-creation workshops with local citizens to raise awareness and seek solutions to the problem of abandoned bicycles.

Visiting Rivne as part of the Growing Green Cities Lab
July 6, 2021
On May 18-19 SYNCHRO SPACE team visited the Green Trail that runs through the entire region of Rivne, Ukraine. Together with the embassy of the Kingdom of The Netherlands in Kyiv and WorldStartup, the Growing Green Cities Lab is kicking off.

Learning Circle 'How to find the right impact investor'
May 18, 2021
12 founders had a great peer to peer learning experience
In April we organized our first Learning Circle on 'How to find the right impact investor'. The idea of the Learning Circles is for founders to take a deep dive into a certain topic and learn a lot from both experts and fellow founders. In our first Learning Circle, we explored the topic of finding the right impact investor, which is a challenge for a lot of impact driven founders.
We kicked off with four Live Talks, led by Michelle Chakkalackal (Impact Business Consultant & Strategist). We had a very interesting line up of expert speakers: Martijn Blom (EVPA), Pavithra Ram and Ynzo van Zanten (Tony's Chocolonely), Marije Schasfoort (Stichting DOEN), James Mitchell (BuildX), Kamael Ann Sugrim (People First HC).


Burgs Foods raises funding from Unknown Group
March 16, 2021
16 March, The Hague. Unknown Group is delighted to announce an investment in Burgs Foods. Founded in 2018 by Sander Peltenburg and George Brandenburg, Burgs Foods manufactures sustainable food products made of insects. With their unique insect processing technologies they intend to become the food factory of the future for everything related to processing insects into food.



Dutch Mentor Community is going strong
January 6, 2021
The Dutch Mentor Community unites seasoned entrepreneurs and managers that are eager to share their knowledge, experience and network with startup founders. In addition to that, the mentors also value the opportunity to meet other mentors and learn from each other’s mentoring experience.
The Dutch Mentor Community is the first open mentor community in The Netherlands, run by the mentors themselves, helping each other to be the best mentors and enhancing mentorship within the Dutch startup ecosystem.

How to deal with misinformation on 5G?
January 4, 2021
The Province of South Holland engaged in a co-creation process with an innovative startup to deal with the problem of misinformation and fake news about 5G. After defining the challenge, WorldStartup scouted for startups that could co-create solutions together with the province. Zephyros is developing an easy to use tool that gives government officials and other stakeholders clear insights on all the (mis)information on the topic on social media. The dashboard shows the number of posts per topic, the sentiment (positive, neutral or negative) and also sources and how the information is spread.




Finch Floating Homes
December 14, 2020
This is Finch Floating Homes. As a recap and result of their session ‘Floating homes how to deal with severe floods’ on the CoCreate Future Cities platform, we’ve held an interview with the founder of the global impact startup. Next to our medium articles and the startup Tuesdays that we organize we’ve started and experimented with our podcast channel. Please check the first one out.

Finding better solutions to the nutrition of human beings
July 9, 2020
Ivana Dvořáková’s first encounter with crickets was during a school presentation about the sustainability of crickets. After that presentation, Ivana and some of her friends went to a pet store and bought their first crickets which they then tried. From the start she thought it tasted amazing.


Ivana Dvořáková
Founder of Terraz Food

Work in peace and breathe with ease knowing the air around you is safe and healthy
July 8, 2020
The idea for uHoo came when Dustin and Brian were studying in Hong Kong. Both Dustin and Brian have respiratory difficulties from which they were suffering more due to the air quality in the dormitories in Hong Kong.


Dustin Onghanseng
Founder of uHoo

With an eye on the sustainability and health benefits of cricket-based food
July 8, 2020
Burgsfoods was founded by Sander Peltenburg and George Brandenburg in 2017. Burgsfoods is a company that creates meat substitutes that consist of insects, mainly crickets and grasshoppers.


Sander Peltenburg
Founder of De Krekerij