Project description
Accelerating start-ups road to success
European incubators play a key role in the development of new business ideas and bringing them to market. However, despite the efficiency in both creating and supporting startups in the early stages, EU incubators face challenges in the scaling of startups to reach global markets. The EU-funded project, Scale-up Champions, aims to bridge this gaps by providing: access to public and private customer networks, access to EU-wide talent, access to capital, potential corporate partners and opportunities for scaling-up across borders. The partners will, through the creation of standardized services, connect start-up ecosystems and facilitate better coordination between partners. The ambition of the project is for these services to be adopted by all incubators after the completion of the project.
Objective
The main challenge that the European start-up ecosystem is facing, is that innovative start-ups fail to scale up at a sufficient rate. Start-up incubators play a significant role in helping start-ups in Europe to scale up. An Incubator is a set-up to reduce the chances of failure of an early stage start-up and they have a deep impact on start-up ecosystem and its stakeholders. Although incubators have an increasingly important role in supporting early stage companies with the basic needs of developing a company, they are consistently failing to provide services that are needed for companies to go global and scale up.
The Scale-up Champions project builds on the premise of equalising opportunities of scaling up for start-ups across Europe and connects less and more developed startup ecosystems.
Our strategic objective is supported by the following sub-objectives:
• Increase the connectedness among members of deep-tech start-up ecosystems and their companies (start-ups and scale-ups) and to the larger european business ecosystem seeking maximum synergies.
• Increase access to customers, private and public, access to qualified employees, access to the right combination of finance and prospects for scaling up across borders.
• Stimulate European investments in deep-tech digital sectors through increasing the number of cross-border investments.
To achieve these objectives, Scale-up Champions’ consortium will implement the following actions:
• Develop a method for experience-sharing among project partners that fosters the collaboration between different European start-up incubators.
• Foster start-up and corporate cooperation in order to build sustainable partnerships through active support of start-ups and corporations.
• Build the fundraising capacity of deep-tech start-ups through an active investment readiness program and create working networks between investors and start-ups.
• Foster cross-border activities for European start-ups in order to support interna
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
IA - Innovation actionCoordinator
61-612 Poznan
Poland