Emerging ecosystems for entrepreneurship in Europe (part II)

From my last post it should be clear not to solely focus on Europe’s capital cities for finding entrepreneurial ecosystems. They will rather be found somewhere around smaller regional cities in the proximity of universities and research institutes (eg. Leuven, Cambridge, Heidelberg, Tampere) and were baptized as clusters of innovation (or valleys). Real innovation clusters are mostly sector focused (Food Valley (NL), Medicon Valley (DK)) and linked up with big corporations from that industry.

Other elementary requirements to have healthy ecosystem besides these ‘clusters of innovation’ are seed money, venture support (high tech incubators) and most importantly real entrepreneurs.

Financing has always been an issue. The so called equity gap (raising venture finance between 200k euro – 1M euro) has always been a serious dumper to kick-off innovative start-ups in Europe and it still is (too a large extent). We don’t have such a lively Business Angel scene as in US, nor do we have a large pool of serial entrepreneurs. But also here things are changing. Eventually European entrepreneurs had to wait for government initiatives to help bridging this equity gap. A good example tackling this problem in the German market is the recently launched and very active High-Tech-GruenderFonds and we are now waiting for other EU countries to launch similar initiatives.

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