Redefining The Global Robotics Education Market From Estonia

The story of an 18-year-old project becoming a real company and opening up a new franchise every week.

Estonia.

Cyprus.

China.

Greece.

Colombia.

India.

Iran.

Guatemala.

Afghanistan.

Nigeria.

Texas.

These are the eleven countries in which Robotex already has a presence with over twenty others in the works.

How has a project that was started as an examination event in 2001 achieved this international expansion within the last 8 months? Why would anyone need the franchise rights for a once small robotics competition? And most importantly, where is it all leading to?

Robotex International 2017 in Tallinn featured over 27'000 people and 1346 robots.

“Call it, the biggest robotics festival on the planet. “ — Peter Vesterbacka

In the wake of 2017, a new team was assembled for organising the Estonian 17th annual robotics competition. At that time, no one knew it could be the last new team that had to be put together from scratch.

Up to this point, a new group of people had been compiled for each year’s Robotex event held in the premises of Tallinn Technical University since 2001. But the event had outgrown the building, while also becoming too big of a piece for any short-term crew to work on it.

Already in 2016, people started to dream about breaking the Guinness World Record by hosting the biggest individual robotics competition the world had ever seen. Only missing that by about fifty teams. However, it was still close to one thousand robots and around ten thousand people attending the event…

So in 2017, a new attempt had to be made. This time reaching 27'000 people and 1346 robots (also known as teams). Enough to break the current record by more than two hundred teams. While also giving us the right to call ourselves the biggest.

But what to do after achieving the longtime goal?

After all, it is not that motivating to break your own record and get a chance to call oneself bigger than the biggest of 2017…

We already have the first success story that was partially started due to Robotex. Apparently, there could perhaps be no Starship if first there would not have been Robotex!

Thankfully we had already set some other activities in motion by starting to work on attracting more international talent to Estonia. More so, in the wake of 2017 another great thing happened, as Ahti Heinla, the founding engineer of Skype and now the founder and CEO of Starship approached us.

Years prior to this moment, Ahti had attended the Robotex competition with a bunch of friends thinking building robots would be easy and fun. The latter yes! But they found out it was not that easy. Or at least they did not manage to win anything for two years in a row.

Yet it ignited the interest to keep on exploring the field!

Now building yet another successful company, Ahti had a new challenge. They needed to find more hireable talent. And the Estonian universities are not producing enough of it. So perhaps we could just import them from elsewhere by first attracting them to Estonia. But how?

So that is when Robotex got funds from Ahti to make sure the event of 2017 would attract more international talent than ever before. And for that, Sander started to travel towards all directions. Colombia. France. Japan. China. The United States. India. Etc. With the sole mission to promote the event.

And it worked!

For the first time, in the late 2017, Robotex event had groups of participants from Mexico and China, as well as multiple journalists from Japan and Singapore.

But from early on, the team realised it would not make sense to spend all this money on marketing alone…

Hosting just one event a year is not a sufficient model for the survival. There needs to be a pool of activities to build a sustainable organisation.

Instead, the team started to play around with the idea of building a global robotics ecosystem. Going heads-up with international organisations that have existed since the late 80s and early 90s, such as FIRST and BEST. We actually believe their models to be outdated and unfair for their franchisees and want to develop something better.

As it happened, we already had one successful example of a franchise event held in Cyprus. And three potential partners approaching us from China. Thus making it easier to justify the investment into the search of other franchisees, as well as a model that would redefine it all.

First up, we knew it would take more than just the competitions to make it all worthwhile. And therefore started to test other concepts, such as a corporate-focused robotics conference, different education programs and a way to help generate new startups. Concepts that could be implemented in all the countries Robotex would enter.

And this has become the differentiating part between us and every other robotics program!

Robotex, as the organisation, is not only about the competitions and fun.

We are rather like a 20-year-long accelerator…

Taking a 4-year-old or older kid. Giving them knowledge about robotics and entrepreneurship. Helping them start companies in their teens and twenties (or find one to work for). And making sure corporates & investors would discover those startups. All while the public learns a bunch about robotics.

Or at least we are moving towards becoming such an organisation with operations in at least 25 countries by the end of 2019!

Which is the concept our newly found franchisees’ trust — believing it helps them build sustainable organisations. Something other programs seem to ignore…

In 2018, Robotex International festival hosted in Tallinn, Estonia will feature the biggest robotics conference in the Nordics, 1500+ robots and over 35'000 people!