Boston-Strasbourg Sister Cities

60 Years Strong in 2020

Boston and Strasbourg officially established a Sister City Partnership in 1960. Strasbourg, like Boston, is a center of government, economy, culture, education, and medicine. Already host to the Council of Europe, the European Court of Human Rights, and the European Parliament, Strasbourg is striving to become Europe’s new innovation capital. Strasbourg and Boston are known for their majestic churches and beautiful historic landmarks. Both cities place a great emphasis on historic preservation. Since the first official visit to Strasbourg in 1960, many events and exchanges between artists, government officials and students have taken place between the two cities.

Recently Mayor Walsh welcomed Mayor of Strasbourg Roland Reis and a delegation of city officials for a two day program that included attendance at the Boston Marathon, and a visit to the Roxbury Innovation Center. An emphasis is being put on innovation as both ecosystems have identified synergistic collaboration opportunities on many areas on which they share common interests and belief such as Healthcare, Environment and more.

The City of Boston’s Sister City Program, in Boston is led by the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development in an effort to support business development in the international market and engage with partners to promote Boston as a global city. In Strasbourg, this program is managed by Strasbourg Eurometropolis together with several ecosystem partners including Cajuba Finance a business angel fund who helped fund the launch and acceleration of this new innovation cooperation initiative. Innouvo a Boston company which specializes in helping investors, public and private, as well as entrepreneurs transform their business ideas into bankable realities has designed and executed an end to end program that is tailored to the specific needs and cultural differences of entrepreneurs from both nations.

Objectives

International Cooperation

Global landscapes are evolving rapidly and becoming more complex, requiring economies to work collaboratively to solve some of the challenges of the upcoming decades. More importantly they should be able to create synergies, turning these into seized opportunities. The two cities will work together to help innovators more successfully achieve their entrepreneurial ambitions, bringing their solutions to more people, in France and Europe through Strasbourg and to the U.S. and the world through Boston.

Innovation Excellence

To “compete” in the current environment becoming efficient at innovation is critical. This program is aimed to help entrepreneurs prepare themselves, explore the targeted new markets and help them soft-land their business in their new desired market. With it is our goals to bring new business to both cities, capitalizing on innovations to help create jobs, opportunities and tomorrow’s companies.

Ecosystem Excellence

This program will provide opportunities for its participants: entrepreneurs, partners, public and private investors and government officials: to exchange and define better ways to innovate. This will help entrepreneurs collaborate on win-win international relations and to continue to grow both ecosystems into the most entrepreneur and business friendly places to operate from on the planet. The philosophy behind this program is not to replace or compete with existing programs but instead to promote and bring all of these together, in a more structured manner, in order to facilitate entrepreneurship and increase success rates and help accelerate time to market for innovation made to matter.

An international Venture Program designed by