We signed a MANIFESTO of scale up Europe
As a platform building community of startups, scale ups, entrepreneurs, accelerators, investors and the whole innovation ecosystem, we endeavour to build an innovative, highly competitive environment and prosperous civil society.
We fully agree that the European startup ecosystem needs to join forces as a community and step up to respond to the opportunities and challenges that await our continent.
Therefore we, along with our foreign partners, signed the manifesto ahead of Scale-Up Europe’s call to join forces around startups.
Scale-Up Europe is a call to join forces around startups: to reinforce Europe’s sovereignty, develop the prosperity of our economies and societies, and achieve the objectives of social cohesion and climate transition that are at the heart of the European project.
We believe that investing in disruptive tech and growing leaders able to harness the potential of the current industrial revolution are of critical importance for our continent, for at least three reasons:
- What is at stake is not only our ability to stay at the forefront of innovation, but also whether we can maintain a major role in the balance of international power and establish our own rules and standards.
- Tech and startups are at the heart of the prosperity of our economies and societies. They generate millions of jobs across a range of skills and sectors and, by creating significant value they are well positioned to help preserve our European social model.
- Achieving the objectives of social cohesion and climate transition, that are at the core of the European project, will not be possible without the contribution of entrepreneurs.
We have identified five key challenges on EuropeEurope’s road forward:
- Appropriate funding from European investors is missing on the late and exit stages of the ecosystem, in particular IPO. The right balance has to be found between expertise, favorable regulation for private investors, as well as an efficient multiplicator effect for public money.
- European startups are fighting to attract the best talent and are not sufficiently open to diversity. A more open, less fragmented pan European market is key to winning the global battle for startup talent. In this respect, diversity is a strong enabler to be placed at the core of our ecosystem.
- Europe is still behind on developing deep tech Scale-Ups. Creating appropriate funding mechanisms, that bring together the science and business worlds to channel research efforts, are appropriate levers for Europe to become the world’s deep tech powerhouse.
- Efficient collaboration between startups and corporations has to be enhanced. Promoting winning collaboration models, understanding cultural differences, increasing mutual understanding and facilitating startup takeovers by European corporates are appropriate tools to bridge the startups and corporate gap.
- For these ideas to reach full bloom, further investment in coordination and execution needs to be made at the European level. Scale-Up Europe needs to graduate from a report to a fully-fledged initiative, with both the capacity and the mandate to help transform this report into reality.