SMEs & Corporates
Corporates attend Athens Tech Summit to design how innovation enters the organisation, not to chase trends. ATS brings together investors, founders, policymakers, and advisors in a senior, low-noise environment where innovation is discussed as a structural, financial, and regulatory challenge.
1. Structuring Open Innovation
Corporates attend Athens Tech Summit to design how external innovation is identified, integrated, and scaled within the organisation in a structured and repeatable way. Rather than focusing on isolated pilots or one-off collaborations, ATS frames open innovation as a strategic and governance challenge that requires clear decision pathways, accountability, and alignment with corporate objectives. Through exposure to investors, founders, policymakers, and advisors, corporates gain insight into how partnerships with startups and scaleups can move beyond experimentation toward procurement, investment, acquisition, or long-term collaboration models that are viable at scale.
2. Talent & Capability Access
Athens Tech Summit provides corporates with access to founders, operators, and technical leaders who are already operating with an understanding of regulatory, capital, and infrastructure constraints. This context allows corporates to engage talent that is capable of working within complex organisational environments and contributing to execution rather than only ideation. By participating in discussions focused on real-world challenges such as scaling under regulation, capital intensity, and long-term transition, corporates are able to identify teams and individuals whose skills and mindset align with the demands of large, established organisations.
3. Financing Innovation
Corporates use ATS to explore how innovation initiatives can be financed in ways that balance strategic control with capital efficiency. The Summit exposes corporate participants to different models for funding innovation, including internal venture building, spin-outs, joint ventures, and collaboration with external investors and public funding bodies. By understanding how private capital, public funding instruments, and corporate balance sheets interact, corporates can make more informed decisions about when innovation should remain internal and when it should be structured as an independent or semi-independent entity to maximise its chances of success.
4. Long-Term Transition & Regulation
The Athens Tech Summit enables corporates to place innovation decisions within the context of long-term regulatory and structural change. Through discussions addressing future obligations related to energy transition, sustainability targets, artificial intelligence governance, and cross-border compliance, corporates gain clarity on how regulation is likely to shape markets and operating conditions over the coming decades. This forward-looking perspective allows organisations to align innovation strategy with unavoidable constraints, reducing regulatory risk and ensuring that investment in new capabilities supports long-term resilience rather than short-term experimentation.
5. Access to High Level Professional Advisors
Corporates attending ATS gain direct access to senior professional advisors operating at the intersection of strategy, capital, regulation, and execution. ATS brings together experienced consultants, accountants, legal advisors, and structuring specialists who work daily with investors, scaleups, family offices, and public institutions.
Unlike traditional conferences, ATS provides a low-noise, high-trust environment in which corporates can engage advisors in substantive discussions around open innovation structures, holding company design, IP strategy, cross-border expansion, governance, compliance, and exit readiness. These conversations are framed around real constraints and future obligations, not hypothetical scenarios.
For corporates designing or refining innovation programmes, intrapreneurship initiatives, or venture partnerships, this access enables early alignment between strategic intent and execution reality: reducing friction, avoiding costly redesigns, and accelerating decision quality. ATS allows corporates to identify advisors who understand both corporate complexity and the expectations of capital markets, long before formal mandates are required.
ATS connects corporates with the advisory expertise needed to translate innovation ambition into structured, executable outcomes.
ATS helps corporates turn innovation from aspiration into structure, aligned with capital, regulation, and reality.