Manifesto to support European startups
More than 200 startups, founders and investment funds have signed a manifesto, a call to join forces around European startups. One goal is that Europe should have to 10 technology companies each valued at more than Euro 100bn by 2030.
“We, founders and startups, corporations, investment funds, industry groupings and other innovation ecosystem stakeholders, are joining forces as a community and stepping up to respond to the opportunities and challenges that await our continent”, they say.
Among signatories are representatives for Springer, the European Commission, BMW, French Government, German Startup Association, Airbus and Blablacar.
“Over the past decade, Europe has built a prosperous, fast growing and resilient startup ecosystem that attracted 40 billion in 2020 sixfold the investment of 2010 and spawned global scale ups including 70+ unicorns, creating more than 2 million jobs.”
The call says there are five key challenges on Europe’s rad forward:
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Europe is still behind on developing deep tech scale ups. Creating appropriat e 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.
4. Efficient collaboration between startups and corporates 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.
5. 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.
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