Analytics, EU – Baltic States, Innovations, Investments, Markets and Companies, Modern EU, Technology

Over the last decade, many global initiatives have been created to celebrate entrepreneurship. Typically, such events follow the so-called Silicon Valley format: i.e. keynote motivational speeches, networking sessions, etc.

However, the EU’s approach is different and requires something more when it comes to entrepreneurship and business to meet corporate peculiarities. Regional diversity and local policy-making still play a big role in shaping European startups.

Hence, European regions and separate states are key players in helping entrepreneurs to incorporate a business activity, creating a company, providing grants or arranging taxes breaks.

That is why the EU decided to include regions and countries in “conversation”; thus the idea of creating the Startup Europe Week, SEW.

Startup Europe Week is an initiative promoted by the European Commission and Startup Europe.

New start-up week in EU

In the beginning of February 2017 (1-5^th February) a new Startup Europe Week, SEW took place at the Committee of the Regions’ building (CoR) in Brussels. During the week, the EU regions discussed all the issues to support European entrepreneurs.

CoR realizes that only local actions can help business started; though organized events, workshops and speeches will be specifically relevant to local realities.

The SEW’s goals are numerous: - to show the best initiatives promoted by regions to support entrepreneurs; - to inform the local authorities about what already exists to help them; - provide live consulting sessions on how to open a company, apply for a grant etc.; - share among regional officers what other regions in Europe are doing and what can be leveraged locally; - connect regional officers, investors and corporates to create stronger local entrepreneurship community. 

Get Involved

The main SEW’s goal was to bring together as many regions as possible. To help in this venture, the Startup Europe and the EU Committee of the Regions invited most relevant people to make a difference for entrepreneurs.

Thus the new SEW-17 has been a great opportunity for participants to learn and get the resources already available, be aware of the European level of doing business.

Thus the SEW’s advantages included:

– Information sessions on local specific actions currently developed by your local authority to support entrepreneurs (i.e. grants, tax breaks, office space, funding etc.);

– Regional authorities’ opportunities to speak and make sure which current initiatives can benefit a particular startup;

– Information sessions showed numerous Startup Europe projects and European Commission funds available for startups;

– Regional representatives through workshops guided entrepreneurs on topics in which they can help (i.e. how to incorporate a company, how to apply for a cohesion grant etc.);

– Communications with local entrepreneurs and investors on how they smartly used the resources provided by the local authority to create or improve their businesses.

More on SEW-17 see in: http://startupeuropeweek.eu/about/; - http://www.startupheatmap.eu/; and - http://startupeuropeclub.eu/.   

Startup Europe Partnership, SEP

The main purpose of Startup Europe partnership (SEP) is to link the most promising European startups with large and medium corporates who are committing capital, seniority (involvement of heads of innovation office or corporate development) and procurement channels. It has been developed in partnership with corporates (BBVA, Orange, Telefónica, Microsoft, Telecom Italia, Unipol, Enel), investors (the European Investment Bank Group/European Investment Fund) and education institutions (Cambridge University, IE Business School, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society). See: http://startupeuropeclub.eu/sep/.  

SEP was launched by the former Commission vice-President and EU Commissioner for digital agenda Neelie Kroes at the Davos World Economic Forum in January 2014. Matching and Sharing Events are organized each year in parallel with the most relevant European startup events.

Hundreds of qualified meetings are taking place between selected startups and SEP corporate members. Besides, SEP Investors Forum Event are organized annually (see mapping of European scale-ups and investors in SEP Monitor reports).

SEP helps the best European startups to scale-up by providing qualified connections to large and medium corporate companies (“Matching”). SEP also contributes to identify and share best practices through startup-corporate interactions by Events and Research (“Sharing”).

SEP is also involved in identifying and reporting the “scale-ups”, i.e. the fast growing startups at European level (“Mapping”).

Startup Europe Regions Network –SERN

One of the goals of the Startup Europe (SE) Initiative of the European Commission is to “reinforce the links between people, business and associations who build and scale up the startup ecosystem”. Under this objective several initiatives and networks have been promoted such as the Web Investors Forum, the Accelerator Assembly or the Crowd funding Network, just to name a few.

Under the same spirit, but with a clear focus on aggregating and leveraging regional support for startups, a new network has been created in October 2016 in Brussels, at an event held at the Committee of Regions: the “Startup Europe Regions Network (SERN)”.

As it has happens with the other networks and initiatives sponsored by SE, the goal of SERN is not that of replacing or duplicating other networks that may build on similar players or have (partially) overlapping objectives. The main goal of SERN is that of occupying an empty space and contributing to fill a gap clearly felt by EU startups in terms of startup gap funding, while also addressing other relevant barriers to startups’ growth, such as harmonization of policies and regulations, access to talent and to major research infrastructures.

See: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/14/technology/for-tech-start-ups-in-europe-an-oceanic-divide-in-funding.html?_r=0.

The Startup Europe Regions Network will gather EU regions committed to startup support to offer a first virtual interconnected space for EU startups to scale up, aiming to leverage private investments with European and regional ones so as to create critical mass. The primary focus for final beneficiaries will be already established startups, and the target will be companies that have already achieved first results, possibly with support from regional programmes, and are now aiming to grow global, while still having less than 5 years of existence.

For this, the network will invest in new instruments and pilot schemes, in line with the priorities defined by the European Commission and the Committee of Regions and for the benefit of European startups.

For more information on this problem see:

http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/about-startup-europe.

For the SERN to be created, regions must be strongly behind it and committed to participate. The creation of SERN must follow a true bottom-up approach and reflect the engagement of a minimum critical mass of regions that are willing to act as founding members and as steering committee of this new network.

It is expected that a minimum of between 6 and 10 regions will endorse the creation of SERN and will benefit from a status of “founding members”. This status should be reflected in the Articles of the Association, conceding them special privileges in the governance of the association. They will also be automatically nominated for a 1^st term at the ‘Steering Committee’ of the association that will be responsible for the executive management, with one region taking on the Presidency.

Running operations of the association, including operational management, communication and hosting will be ensured by a secretariat, to be provided by INOVA+ (Belgium) as coordinator of the ‘ePlus Ecosystem’ project and promoter of the initiative. Following the creation of the SERN as an ‘aisbl’, membership will become opened to all EU regions, as ‘ordinary members’.

Running costs should be covered by a membership fee system, where, in line with privileges and responsibilities, fees for ‘founding members’ should be higher than for ‘ordinary members’. Additional activities should be funded by projects, with resource to EU, regional or private (under the form of sponsorships) funds.

Source: http://startupeuropeclub.eu/sern/