Scale-up Champions: Scale up innovative businesses across the EU

ended

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