14/05/2026
Back from Malta, with many reflections from Federico Valotto and Najeeb Arghistani, who joined us on the trip.
After many panels, pitches, and conversations with founders and investors at the EU-Startups Summit, our two workshop winners brought back insights that we want to share with the whole community.
From Federico:
📍The most impactful innovation isn’t the most complex, it’s the one that solves the real bottleneck. What stood out was meeting founders focused on direct solutions to organizational problems, not just building more software.
📍Just as important: the ability to communicate complexity simply. The most successful projects weren’t those with the most sophisticated tech, but those that could explain the “what” and “why” without barriers, making innovation accessible to stakeholders, communities, and the public.
📍And despite AI dominating every conversation, the strongest takeaway was about people. AI can optimize, but intuition, empathy, and human vision still determine the direction of progress. Keeping people and human capital at the center isn’t just ethics, it’s a necessity.
From Najeeb:
📍Building a strong business and technology case for social enterprises isn’t straightforward, and the Summit made that gap visible. Conversations with founders and investors from different backgrounds surfaced what could be useful, but also what gets lost in translation.
📍Explaining to others what Opes does and what SEOC represents pushed us to think more clearly about our own mission, priorities, and how we communicate them.
📍AI came up everywhere, how enterprises use it for decision-making, growth, scaling. But it also raised critical questions about its impact on people, especially on those that social enterprises exist to support.
“Overall, the summit helped us both see the gap between mainstream startup language and the realities of many social enterprises. It gave us new ideas, clearer questions, and useful lessons to bring back into our work.”
