HOW IT WORKS

COMPETITION FRAMEWORK

Every year, we identify the top startups, founders, and key ecosystem players.

Our systematic approach allows us to discover leading tech companies and talented entrepreneurs driving innovation all over the world.

We start by opening up public nominations on the national level. Anyone can nominate an individual, startup, company, or organisation in any relevant category per country through the GSA proprietary competition system.

Categories can belong to either the baseline categories or the vertical categories and can be divided further into startups or individuals.
Nominees have to accept the invitation to the competition and provide the required data to be properly assessed in the selected category and, consequently, become approved applicants.
To become an approved applicant, the finalist needs to fit the criteria for the specific category.
Parallelly with the public nominations, our regional partners are also invited to recommend the best candidates to participate in the competition by nominating them. These sourced nominations are to ensure quality and not solo rely on organic nominations.

The finalised applications are collected through the GSA proprietary competition system.

A shortlist of up to 3 finalists per category is selected across the region and will compete at the regional level as finalists.
The shortlist will be quality assured by the GSA team.

The regional winners are selected through a combination of the ratings and the total amount of collected public votes.
The overall rating of each finalist is based on the average of the summed points based on the scoring system and the number of public votes collected.
Public voting will always account for 25% of the calculation.
Unlike all the startup categories, the People’s Choice category winners are entirely selected by the number of collected public votes.
The regional winners are either announced at the Regional Grand Finale Day and/or published online afterwards.

At the global level, the regional winners (i.e. global finalists) are asked to engage in the public voting phase and to register for the Global Grand Finale Days.
On the other hand, all global finalists will automatically be registered in their same categories.
Phase 3 is repeated to find the global winners; however, this time by a global jury.
The global winners are announced at the Global Grand Finale Days and are also published online afterwards.