Keihanna Global Acceleration Program Plus, or in short, KGAP+ is an international accelerator program that provides assistance to Japanese and International startups who wish to start a business in Japan and vice versa. The main goal of this program is to support established startup companies through mentorship in a certain period of time, focusing on testing PoC. In coordination with representing accelerator, ERA, in New York and incubator program, Barcelona Activa in Barcelona, Israel Innovation Authority, and Canada’s Innovation Agency, KGAP+ can provide strong support developing the businesses abroad. In Japan, startup companies are encouraged to test out their concepts at Keihanna Science City and nearby where it is accumulated with business entities, universities, research facilities, and public services.
As an initiative to create innovation on a global level, Keihanna Research Complex (RC) from the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) and Global Digital MOJO (GDM) have agreed to work together under the Public Foundation of Kansai Research Institute (KRI) in order to accelerate the creation of Keihanna and Kansai Innovation Ecosystem.
To being the process, in December 2018, the MOJO Team was tasked to internationalise the existing KeVECS Japan Acceleration programme – the result was the O2O KGAP+ international programme. The MOJO global team curated Batch 1 and 2 of 20 companies from June 2019 and designed and managed exhibition stands at the Barcelona Smart City Expo World Congress in 2018 and 2019. Work also included organising key-skill mentor webinars, investor and partner alignment, pitch presentations, and brand and content development for program support. MOJO also built a network of international mentors for the program and introduced online tools to make KGAP+ a major O2O acceleration program service. The result of 2 years of hard work saw the KGAP+ community of companies and partners grow around the world to now cover over 80 companies and partners.
As of now, there is an ongoing event, Japan Challenge, in which 48 companies from 8 countries have participated. 5 startups are from the Keihanshin area (Kyoto, Osaka, Hyogo) and 2 startups from Tokyo are participating in Batch 5. Overall, the event starts with a pitch event, kick-off, pilot testing, and demo day. MOJO continues to support the programme in 2021 and beyond. Happy 2-year birthday KGAP!