Start-ups should be promoted as growth drivers

Start-ups and scale-ups are of crucial importance for the future of Europe because they drive innovation and sustainable growth, create high-quality jobs, attract investments and reduce strategic dependencies. The EU Commission is now presenting a funding strategy for start-ups and scale-ups.

Stéphane Séjourné, executive vice president of prosperity and industrial strategy, emphasizes that companies that are founded in Europe have to grow in Europe.

Detire growth engines

« With the introduction of the EU strategy for start-ups and scale-ups, we open up growth engines for the most innovative and most promising companies in Europe. »

In this way, bureaucracy is to be broken down and access to financial resources is to be relieved, « we improve your possibilities to do business in the internal market. In other words, we want to put Europe at the center of the global innovation landscape for companies and investors. A Europe that is preceded by its own power and is a place in which innovation thrives, » says Séjourné.

Start-ups and scale-ups are of crucial importance for the future of Europe because they drive innovation and sustainable growth, create high-quality jobs, attract investments and reduce strategic dependencies.

Five areas

However, despite solid foundations, too many companies still have difficulty bringing their ideas out of the laboratory on the market or growing within the EU, according to Brussels.

The strategy encounters these challenges by supporting start-ups and scale-ups throughout their life cycle, from founding to expansion to ripening phase and success in the EU.

In the strategy, the EU Commission determined the most important needs of start-ups and scale-ups and proposes a number of measures in five main areas: promoting an innovation-friendly environment, better financing, support for the market acceptance and expansion, the recruitment and binding of top forces and an easier access to infrastructure, networks and services.

Savings and investment union

Start-ups and scale-ups need better financing options, a larger and more integrated EU risk capital market and a greater integration of European institutional investors. The initiative for a savings and investment union will make a decisive contribution to opening up more financing and investment opportunities in the EU, says Séjourné.

The strategy provides for the introduction of an initiative « From the Laboratory to Einhorn » (Lab to Unicorn), which includes the European start-up and scale-up hubs in order to promote the networking of university ecosystems throughout the EU. This includes a concept for licensing, license fees and the distribution of the income. In addition, academic institutions and their inventors are to be involved in the marketing of intellectual property and the establishment of spin-offs.

In order to keep top forces and put on, start-ups and scale-ups need better access to highly qualified specialists. The strategy presents the « Blue Carpet » initiative (blue carpet), the focus of which is particularly on entrepreneurial education, tax aspects of employee shares and cross -border employment.

The Commission will also promote the Blue Card Directive and encourage Member States to introduce quick procedures for founders from non-EU countries.