Startup Manifesto 2.0

Startup Manifesto 2.0 (or Scale-Up Manifesto) is conceived as a policy document to inform and guide European and national policy on startups and scale-ups and tech entrepreneurship, at European and national level. A salient feature of the new policy document will be its focus on scaling up. In the political realities of 2013, when the original Startup Manifesto was written, it was critical to articulate the need for policy support for startups. Presently, one may say that the role and importance of startups are duly acknowledged, especially at the EU level, with a dedicated programme at European Commission’s DG Connect (“Startup Europe”), and a forthcoming programme at DG Grow (“the Start-up Initiative”). Today, scaling up of successful European businesses has taken central stage in a wider societal and political debate. In the words of Gunther Oettinger, European commissioner for digital economy and society, “Startup is good, scale-up is better” (speech at the ICT2015 conference in Lisbon). The European Digital Forum as a collaborative hub has accumulated rich expertise on this subject. Recently, it published a policy brief “From Startup to Scaling-up: Growing Europe’s Digital Economy,” with a ten-step programme to support scaling up of European startups. This document serves as vital input material in the renewed Startup Manifesto. Another very crucial thing that the original Startup Manifesto did not address sufficiently is the development of the single European market. Most of the Startup Manifesto recommendation could be implemented at the national level. In contract the Startup Manifesto 2.0 will focus strongly on the pan-European solutions and actions that EU member states can implement jointly. It will bear direct relevance to the string of recent policy initiatives launched by the Juncker Commission, most notably, the Single Digital Market, the Capital Markets Union and the Single Market Strategy. Another crucial difference between Startup Manifesto and Startup Manifesto 2.0 (“Scale-Up Manifesto”) will be an in-built methodology, or monitoring system to measure the progress in its implementation. This is a radical departure from Startup Manifesto whose recommendations (e.g. such as “initiate a mentality shift across Europe in terms of how we define success”) were vague and ambiguous in terms of their monitoring and implementation. This issue can be avoided at the design stage in the Startup Manifesto 2.0. Thus, Startup Manifesto 2.0 will include a textual narrative, developed jointly with the startup community and stakeholders (reflecting their advice and recommendations), and in-built monitoring methodology (uniquely designed by the consortium members) to track the implementation of the Manifesto. Delivery date is M21 – the document is to be unveiled at the Digital Assembly in Bratislava, Slovakia on 29 September 2016.