Helping Nordic companies abroad

New tool helps Nordic SMEs in growth markets

New tool helps Nordic companies in growth marketsNordic small and medium-sized enterprises who wants to establish themselves in new growth markets often meet trouble on their way. A new free Nordic tool can help them go the distance. Growth markets of today and tomorrow offers exiting business opportunities for Nordic companies. However, the challenges are many, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Understanding local market dynamics and customer preferences are but a few of the obstacles that may arise in a partnership.

Getting a local partner can be a good solution, but is often easier said than done. Cultural differences and communication problems may obstruct what could have been a great partnership. Together with five Nordic partners, Nordic Innovation wants to help Nordic SMEs looking to growth markets in meeting these challenges. They have developed a tool for helping Nordic SMEs working better and more efficiently with local partners in growth markets.

Visual is good
The tool, aptly named the Growth Market Partner Tool, consists of visual templates designed to meet cultural and communicative misunderstandings and differences. The goal is to assist Nordic SMEs in choosing local partners and maintaining a dialogue with them, which eventually will end in a strong go-to-market plan, benefitting both parties.
The visual style of the tool was chosen to make it easier to avoid misunderstandings between the partners, and to make it easy to customise them after the nature of the SMEs and the partners. According to Nordic companies, this is a fruitful approach.
– We use visual tools not because it is fancy, but because we save a lot of time and money, and we also avoid misunderstandings. Eventually it takes us where we want to go a lot faster, says Andreas Flensborg, CEO of Nordic SME Unumed Ltd.

Free of charge
The visual style also makes the tool templates easy to understand and use, and they are compatible with other tools. As a bonus, the tool can be downloaded for free.

–– It is not our intent to invent the wheel again, but to create a dialogue tool to use together with other tools you might already have. It is a tool designed to make most of the time you already spend with partners, and is very hands-on and operational, says director Anders Kjøller from the Confederation of Danish Industry, one of the partners behind the tool.

The team behind the tool have also made a video where the tool is presented and explained. The video can be found here:

If you are interested in the tool, you can download it for free at www.nordicinnovation.org/SMEpartnertool