Five projects, one mission: Expanding Acceleration Ecosystems
Incubators, accelerators and different types of ‘company-builders’ play a crucial role in providing start-ups with growth support. Due to the diverse innovation landscape in Europe, start-ups from better-connected innovation ecosystems benefit from more local accelerators with greater funding opportunities and more qualified business support services compared to their counterparts elsewhere.
This geographical gap often requires start-ups from less connected ecosystems to move to more established hubs elsewhere in Europe. Consequently, there are fewer scale-ups in less connected innovation ecosystems, creating unbalanced business activity and employment opportunities. The European Commission, launched the ‘Expanding Acceleration Ecosystems’ mission, as part of the European Innovation Ecosystems (EIE) work programme, with the purpose to reverse this flow by making ‘modest’ and ‘moderate’ innovation ecosystems more attractive to international companies interested in setting up their businesses outside the established centres and tapping into the potential of local ecosystems.
In light of this, around one year ago, five projects kicked off to support the European Commission fulfil this mission: sharing business acceleration related best practices, knowledge, tools and methods; exchanging promising start-ups and SMEs; exchanging accelerator programme experts; establishing links between local actors in developing ecosystems, among others, and one of these projects is S3E – The Engine for South European Deep Tech.
S3E has developed an engine of growth to contribute to improving the connectedness and efficiency of the southern European countries’ innovation ecosystems. Our focuses on the acceleration of deep tech research projects, growth startups and scaleups, contributing to closing the innovation gap between these countries and more advanced innovation ecosystems. S3E is supporting south European innovators to develop into deep tech and procure funding for the early stages of development through three innovation programmes: START, CHARGE and REVERSE.
However, S3E is not alone in this mission and four other projects were selected with complementary action plans to expand acceleration ecosystems. Let’s discover them in this blog’s post!
AccelerAction: A pan-European Networked Acceleration Programme to expand acceleration ecosystems and foster the scalability potential of European business
The diverse innovation landscape in Europe and the geographical gap among the “innovation leaders” and the less-connected ecosystems highlights that the latter suffer from weaker entrepreneurial activity and scarcer investments. The EU-funded AccelerAction project aims to improve the quality and outreach of business acceleration services in weaker innovation ecosystems in the field of DeepTech by creation of new pan-European Networked Acceleration Programme (EU-NAP) that will be tested in 3-months blended exchange programme for 10 promising start-ups with special focus on gender dimension. To its end the project will encourage entrepreneurial activities, stimulating cooperation among innovation actors generating alliances and strengthening less connected ecosystems to increase their competitiveness & connectivity also thanks to the creation of the virtual platform with match-making feature.
ACCELERO: Accelerating Local Innovation Ecosystems in Europe
ACCELERO has the ambition of creating a pan-European community of business support organisations (BSOs) as the onestop shop for all BSOs and its “customers”, the startups and SMEs, as well as for peer-to-peer exchange, networking and connectedness for all stakeholders engaged in the broader innovation ecosystem. This will be achieved with an initial ACCELERO extended community apart from consortium members to co-create and pilot-test high-quality business acceleration services with European BSOs from emerging and moderate innovators together with experts from strong and leader innovation regions or Member States, followed by the launch of the community inside Euroquity platform.
Food-scalEUp: Expanding the European digital agri-food acceleration ecosystem
Expanding the European agri-food digital innovation ecosystem’s capacity is a priority for 10 organisations that form Food-scalEUp, an EU-funded project that is focusing on emerging and moderate innovator regions. Its objective is to help these innovator regions become better connected, effective, impactful, resilient and recognised around the globe. To succeed, it will develop optimal business acceleration services in agri-food digital innovation ecosystems; foster connections and transfer knowledge regionally and beyond; and balance the capacity of agri-food digital innovation and acceleration ecosystems in the regions in question.
BEYOND: Boosting pan-european Exchange between acceleration ecosYstems for improving quality and Outreach of business acceleration services in Developing innovation ecosystems
Introducing the new Virtual Accelerator Marketplace (VAM), designed to support joint business accelerator activities for Europe’s startups. It also aims to advance investment flows from net contributor regions towards ‘modest’ and ‘moderate’ ones. Developed by the EU-funded BEYOND project, VAM will test a self-sovereign digital identity scheme (funding passport) available to startups independent of which accelerator they join. Moreover, a joint platform will allow online acceleration and provide a framework for the efficient development of startups. BEYOND will also focus on sharing specific offers from the different project participants and resources; it will develop an incentive structure where all partners benefit from high-quality startups developing their services, and create a cross-region marketplace for fundraising.