Greek organisation Corallia helps small businesses grow

In this episode of Smart Regions, we met the people behind Corallia, a unit of the Athena research centre in Greece that brings together hi-tech clusters, business incubators, and extensive entrepreneurship programmes. Corallia’s aim is to help local businesses and start-ups to grow from the ground up, and reach the international arena.

Corallia works with more than 500 innovative enterprises, and has established three high tech clusters, an attractive proposition for investors, who have so far pumped over 500 million euros of private and foreign investment into the organisation.

Senior manager of Corallia, Nancy Liva, said the goal of the company is to “connect companies of all sizes, universities, research centers, business angels and financial institutions. 

"Our role is to be a cluster facilitator and bring together all those actors in order to collaborate and grow their companies.”

One way Corallia is facilitating business growth, is by supporting STARTAB, an entrepreneurship programme which is designed for young ‘start-uppers’. On the scheme, they have the opportunity to participate in seminars and get a mentor to foster their ideas and plans.

Komitis Stavros is a young ‘start-upper’ who took part in the programme, and told Euronews that before he came to STARTAB, he only had a “general idea” of what he wanted to do with the business, however the programme gave him a “more specific idea in the tasks that [he] needs to focus [his] energy and time on.”

Corallia also supports various accelerator programs, including the Eurobank-sponsored Enter Grow Go (EGG), the most successful business accelerator in Greece.

One startup that grew here, for example, is an automated smart farm that allows you to grow salad indoors without