SEP Policy Workshop: Startups and corporations are disconnected from each other

The “SEP Policy Workshop: European Startup Scene” was held in Brussels on the 4th of May 2015 at the European Parliament in Brussels, where a panel of experts discussed about the challenges facing the European startup ecosystem with a specific focus on Italy, Spain, France and the United Kingdom. Key speakers included Eva Paunova, Member of the European Parliament Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection, Alberto Onetti, Chairman of the Mind the Bridge Foundation & Coordinator of the Startup Europe Partnership (SEP) initiative, Riccardo Luna, Digital Champion of Italy, Liz Fleming, VP International at Spain StartUp, Alice Zagury, CEO of TheFamily, and Wouter Debeyne, Senior Trade & Investment Adviser at UK Trade & Investment.

The key take-away message is that Startups and corporations remain to a large extent fragmented and are disconnected from each other. Due to this reason, initiatives like the Startup Europe Partnership, which attempts to narrow – or completely remove – this distance, represent a powerful vehicle with a great potential to speed up the process of creating global players from European companies. Against this background, the European Commission should:

• Promote and support coordinated activities aiming at mutual collaboration between players with a great potential to speed-up the process of creating global players from European companies.
• Educate young minds, who more prone to taking risks and making informed decisions, in order to promote more and better startups.
• Allocate and distribute resources to those initiatives that promote startup ecosystems at pan-European level, since such initiatives re-start and boost the European economy as a whole, rather than focusing on locally focused actions.
• Further support existing mapping and data mining activities as current evidences shed light upon scarce and scattered efforts, proving that further research.

The SEP Policy Workshop Proceedings are available for download at the link below.

Download SEP Policy Workshop Proceedings