Third and last business mission to Canada is successfully completed

Submitted by Sofie Jensen on 08 June 2023

Canada første dag

The mission to Canada was the third and last mission to take place within the project EU KETs4Dual-Use 2.0, bringing 12 companies to Canada to meet potential collaboration partners.

The mission to Canada took place from May 29th – June 2nd 2023, and was prepared by the KETs4Dual-Use 2.0 consortium together with the contracted mission advisor and consultant ADEXIA. As the objectives with the business missions are to connect European dual-use companies to potential collaboration partners in the targeted countries, ADEXIA had organized individual B2B meetings for each of the participating companies with up to 9 meetings per company. Unfortunately, one company had to cancel last-minute, and the pre-arranged meetings were transformed into online meetings.

Overall, the mission was divided into two stages. The first two days were spent in Montreal before the delegation went to Ottawa for the following two days. The last day was spent in Montreal before departing for Europe. During Monday morning, we kicked off the week with a joint briefing session for the entire delegation to give an overview of the local ecosystem and the organizations Invest Quebec, Montreal International and Desjardins gave a presentation from each of their perspectives. In addition, a French company who recently had opened an office in Montreal, was invited to talk about their experiences and share their best practices when establishing a business, doing business, and recruiting talents in Canada. The briefing session was organized together with the other EU funded project EU Alliance and their delegation, who was visiting Canada in the same week. In addition, during the evening, the two EU consortia had organized an informal networking event for the two delegations and invited stakeholders from the local ecosystem. During the afternoon of Monday and during Tuesday, the companies had B2B meetings in Montreal. The next two days were spent in Ottawa, where the entire delegation attended CANSEC, which is Canada’s largest defence, security and emerging tech event, organized by the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries (CADSI). The exhibition provided opportunity to further connect with Canadian entities and additionally, some of the pre-planned B2B meetings took place at the exhibition area as most of the Canadian defence and security companies were present at the event. After the two days in Ottawa, the delegation went back to Montreal to spend the Friday with follow up meetings, and a debriefing session together with the mission advisor ADEXIA before departing for Europe.

The delegation visit was the first step to identify and foster long term partnerships with Canadian defence and security stakeholders for the European companies.

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