My roles with startups as a founder, investor, and government advisor have revealed several recurring patterns over the years.

Over the past decade, I’ve been asked by several European governments to tackle an important topic—how to boost an early stage startup ecosystem. So I presented my learnings, tools and experience, and I am linking the video to one presentation here. These are the key takeaways:

1. Host a tech conference with global reach

Bringing or creating a tech conference to boost a national ecosystem is paramount. Not only does one foster the collaboration between existing stakeholders, such as corporates, policymakers and academia with startups, but two distinct impact indicators emerged in the past:

People to fall in love with the place 

Bringing a high level of speakers, founders and venture capitalists from all over the world to a place gives the opportunity to fall in love with it - for foreigners for the first time, for the often lost diaspora of talent to fall in love again. This can lead directly to an increased amount of people relocating, as well as Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) to grow and be specifically directed towards innovation.

Entrepreneurship on the public agenda

At an event of scale the local media and wider society inevitably gets entangled with entrepreneurship. When conferences like SXSW or Websummit take place, an entire city becomes engaged, and an entire country becomes excited. This drives engagement and in return increases the likelihood of companies being started and entrepreneurship to become a driving force in innovating a nation’s economy.

2. Create a think tank in government

This is the most obvious, yet most challenging element of the playbook: On one side deriving and designing good policy to foster entrepreneurship in any country or city from the input and learnings of the ecosystem is an obvious advantage, on the other side there must be proper leverage and reach within the government. Not only must there be entrepreneurs from the startup scene in charge of the entity, but direct access to the minister of economy or better yet the prime minister are necessary to be able to adopt policies with the agility of the entrepreneurship ecosystem.

Two immediate impact indicators are:

Modernisation of the national economy

With an ear on the pulse of the innovation economy challenges that are applicable for all businesses of a country become apparent faster - the need to internationalize earlier probably being the main driver differentiating the internet economy from SMB’s as well as a-typical modes of funding the growth require adaptations the entire national economy benefits from.

Agility and attractivity for big tech

With a noticeable orientation of government towards tech, startups, innovation and entrepreneurship the likelihood of education of talent and the financing of development of the workforce as early as in school and university becomes a focal point of the established tech economy: From big tech to venture capitalists tech driven FDI is going hand-in-hand with a innovation driven government.

3. Launch an innovation district (or many)

The accumulation and clustering of talent is an old formula for driving innovation: Clusters in academia have historically proven to be more successful, and nowadays heterogeneous clusters of creative industry, tech, academia and policy are a winning formula for growing an ecosystem. There are clear indicators again for the impact on the ecosystem:

Tangibility of innovation

The simple fact of being able to interact with innovators from all previously mentioned sectors of society makes the likeliness of understanding and learning more likely to occur: When being able to walk in and meeting the people driving innovation from within any given space tears down barriers in society. From politicians to school children, that interaction has proven to move mountains (add meme joke)

Economic

The clustering and marketing of a curated crowd of innovators from all different vertices is the single most socially compatible form of gentrification. The ree-vitalisation of whole neighborhoods can be driven through an innovation district, where not only values increase but jobs are being created and small businesses can thrive. Not for nothing are the innovators of our economy also thought leaders in sustainability and social cohesion, both of which drive direct positive economic impact.

In the previous years and as you can see in these articles our team has been directly involved in a multitude of activities that ultimately accumulated our most recent endeavor, the completion of Factory Lisbon as the largest anchor of the Beato Innovation District. From working on the offer in the location of Websummit for 10 years in Lisbon to founding and presiding the government think tank Startup Portugal from 2016 to 2021, leading to the establishment of the Startup Nations Standard, all aspects of a clear government driven strategy for innovation were able to play out in parallel. As the most measurable impact the amount invested into Portuguese startups grew from €200M in 2016 to over €1.2B in 2021.

‍Hello Europe

For a long time the innovation economy in Europe is stuck in a complaint bubble: Europe overregulates, is fractalized, is behind and will never catch up, you get the drift. But here it is: The internet was conceptualized to prevent a total fallout of communication infrastructure in the case of an attack. Domain Name Servers globally replicate the translation of IP addresses to website addresses, so whenever a node disappears, all others still have that information. Now why in the world would the real world, human-centric innovation be centralized to a geographical place? Why would we copy Silicon Valley in its narcissistic, hegemonial and culturally alienating approach?

Of course we have to decentralize our innovation economy, of course we need to create a network of culturally and socially intact realms, connected through the intention to drive humanity forward, a network of innovation spaces driving prosperity.

There you have it. Leveling the playing field in Europe? Not that hard. All we need to do is understand what has worked, and implement at scale. I have subscribed to that mission, and am working on it every day.

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