Mikk Vainik

My experience in Estonian public service began in R&D policy, continued in e-governance and startup ecosystem development and is now focused on market-creating initiatives via Accelerate Estonia (see SNAP for details). It is getting more and more interesting, I am ready to share my experiences and the Estonian story with you.

In R&D policy, I was responsible for creating and managing an EU funded (ca 10 M EUR) programme that aimed to foster internationalisation of Estonian R&D institutions. My duties included writing the programme paper, organising calls for tender, managing programme finances and activities, representing programme activities and the Ministry of Education and Research both in Estonia and internationally. My experience in e-governance involves various projects at the Estonia State Portal www.eesti.ee, the gateway to Estonian e-services. The projects included building new applications, such as the My Data view at eesti.ee, but also maintenance and a few other things. I also represented the portal internationally - at EU work groups, different studies on digital entrepreneurship, etc. For some time in 2014, I also worked on the strategy and overall management of the State Portal. Later as a content manager at State Portal eesti.ee, my main task was coordinating with other governmental agencies to make the e-governance system as easy as possible for citizens and entrepreneurs. Since 2015, I have been working on Estonian startup policy, coordinating the work of Startup Estonia (http://startupestonia.ee/en, a proud member of Startup Nations) and developing the Estonian capital market system (loans-guarantees-funds) with the help from KredEx, our national financing arm. Professionally it is my mission to make Estonia the best place to start a business in Europe. I expect to do it in a way that enhances my own entrepreneurial skills. In 2017, I was responsible for organising Startup Nations Summit in Tallinn. 

Since then, because of having co-designed the Policy Hack with GEN, I have been hooked with public sector innovation more and more. The overview of our current approach can be found here: https://startupestonia.ee/focus-areas/accelerate-estonia/