Swedish Chamber of Commerce in BiH in cooperation with the Swedish Embassy in Sarajevo, organised a working lunch on March 27th, for the companies that work within IT sector and conduct business between Sweden and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Representatives from IT companies System Verification, ZenDev, DVC Solutions Ltd, Ministry of Programming and Softhouse were present along with his excellency Swedish ambassador Anders Hagelberg and the board representatives of the Chamber. The main goal of the event was to discuss the joint needs and challenges in order to identify how the companies together with the Chamber can enhance business growth in IT between B&H and Sweden.
His excellency the Ambassador of Sweden in BiH welcomed the guests and pointed out the importance of organising in clusters as an effective way to reach fast and effective results by a bottom up approach that comes from the private sector.
In the first part of the event two presentations were held.
Emir Adžović, program manager from UNDP, presented the upcoming SDG conference that has high involvements from Swedish stakeholders and will take place in June in Sarajevo, and informed about the related B2B event that will focus on the segments of IT, wood and automotive industry.
Himzo Musić from Softhouse Balkans, together with Faris Bukva from WEFEC, presented the already started initiative to promote the companies that are decent employers and are compliant with the state rules when conducting business as well as take great care of their employees. The idea is to create decent employer certificate that will promote these companies as positive examples of conducting business both locally but also towards the Swedish clients. This conduct needs to be seen as a business advantage in B&H and not the other way around, they concluded and invited all the present companies to support the initiative.
In the latter part the companies engaged in a work shop in groups and talked about the companies can support each other as well as what kind of support they expect from the chamber as members. The companies concluded that, even though some of them already cooperate in joint delivery towards the Swedish clients, that more such cooperation would be preferred. Further more, all agreed that they share common value ground as well as highly evolved knowledge about meeting the needs of the Swedish market.
Senad Šantić, CEO and co-founder of the company ZenDev was pleased with the outcome of the working lunch:
“In business, every minute is valuable and I am very selective about which events I visit. This one was beneficial since we discussed the main concerns that we share in our industry and created concrete next steps on how we can move forward together. I am looking forward to being part of this cluster. ZenDev is already collaborating with some of the companies present in joint delivery towards Swedish clients and I am very happy to see that all the companies present want to increase this kind of collaboration.”
Next meeting for the cluster will be hosted by the company Ministry of Programming for following up of the action plan concluded and further development of the collaboration.
“In the build up of our company clusters within the Chamber, it is very important that we listen to the needs of the current and future member companies and create such forums where they can be expressed, which is also what we tried to do today. We are very happy to cooperate with very open companies that are wiling to share good ideas and co-join their efforts in closer cooperation among the companies, but also that clearly communicate what we can do together”, Vernisa Rejhan, the president of Swedish Chamber of Commerce and coordinator of the IT-cluster commented.
