Nest Innovation Park Teams Up with Europe’s Top Startup Hub to Power Nigerian Founders
In a bold move to elevate Nigeria’s startup ecosystem, Nest Innovation Park has sealed a landmark partnership with UnternehmerTUM, Europe’s leading innovation and startup hub based in Germany. The collaboration aims to unlock new levels of support for Nigeria’s vibrant community of entrepreneurs, especially young founders and operators in the SME space.
The alliance is part of the “Africa Meets Bavaria” program, a two-year initiative funded by the Bavarian State Chancellery, designed to bridge the innovation divide between Africa and Germany. It creates a direct pipeline for co-creation, market entry, and knowledge exchange between both regions.
Speaking at the announcement, the Co-founder of Nest Innovation Park revealed that this partnership is not just about access but about transformation.
“Nigerian entrepreneurs have the grit and ideas. What they need now are systems, networks, and the right kind of mentorship to scale globally,” he said.
Innovation as a Bridge Between Continents
The initiative is geared toward solving shared global challenges—including sustainability, climate change, and future mobility—by empowering African talents to design local solutions with global impact. In return, German companies gain a strategic foothold in Africa’s fast-growing innovation markets.
Nest joins a pan-African network of innovation powerhouses, including MEST Africa (Ghana), Impact Hub Kigali (Rwanda), and iHub Nairobi (Kenya). Together, they will work alongside UnternehmerTUM—named by the Financial Times as Europe’s top startup hub for 2024–2025—to nurture the continent’s next generation of tech disruptors.
Laying the Groundwork for a Digital Nigeria
The partnership also aligns seamlessly with Nigeria’s digital transformation agenda and reinforces the objectives of the Nigeria Startup Act, which aims to create a more robust, inclusive startup ecosystem.
Beyond ecosystem-level collaboration, the program will activate joint projects between Nigerian universities and research labs and their German counterparts. The goal? To build a launchpad for breakthrough innovation and model a new framework for cross-border entrepreneurship that connects African creativity with European industrial depth.
By bridging two innovation worlds, Nest Innovation Park and UnternehmerTUM are setting the stage for a new era of startup development—one that positions Nigerian founders not just as participants but as global innovation leaders.
