The European Scaleup Institute (ESI) is thrilled to announce its official launch! We are proud to be one of the founding partners (Erasmus Centre for Entrepreneurship, ESADE Business & Law School, ESSEC Business School, Nova SBE Haddad Entrepreneurship Institute, Vlerick Business School, WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management) representing 6 countries across Europe.  

Our mission is to enable Europe to become a leading global scaleup ecosystem. We aim to do this through joint research and educational initiatives across borders, sharing best practices and building a strong knowledge community around scaling up.    

Together with partners across the European scaleup ecosystem, our objectives are to: 

• Inspire a wide audience of (European) scaleups, with research insights, programmes and tools; 
• Align and standardise data and knowledge, by sharing and validating insight across borders; 
• Create and share best practices at company and ecosystem level; 
• Set up joint research initiatives involving world-class European universities, business schools and professionals; 
• Foster faculty exchange programmes and share best practices for scaleup programmes and entrepreneurship education. 

Bridging the Scaleup Gap 

Scaling and high-growth firms play a pivotal role in our economy as champions of innovation and job creation. Known for experimenting with new technologies, concepts and business models, startups are key to bring innovative value to the market. However, they can only maximise their impact once they manage to scale up. The unfortunate reality is that only a fraction of startups manage to scale up, especially in the European context. Scaling and high-growth firms also face a number of pertinent challenges as they transition from starting up, to growing up, to scaling up, and try to persist high-growth over time.   

Prof. dr. Justin Jansen (Erasmus Centre for Entrepreneurship and Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University) at the European Scaleup Workshop 2022 in Brussels:

“Scaling up is not a challenge of an individual country or region. Effective policy and programmes starts with knowledge and insights about the dynamics and differences within and between countries and regions to better understand how to support high-growth firms at a European-level”

ESI’s Inaugural Research & Education Conference on scaling and high-growth firms  

On 1-2 June, at the Nova School of Business and Economics (Cascais, Portugal), academics and practitioners will come together to learn from the latest insights about scaling up and to share best practices in scaleup education.  

The conference consists of keynotes, academic paper sessions as well as roundtables about educational programmes. At the conference, we will also launch a collaborative report with state-of-the-art insights into the European scaleup landscape. For the academic paper sessions, we invite scholars to submit cutting-edge proposals. You can submit your proposals to Justin Jansen (academic chair) via jjansen@rsm.nl by 15 March. More information about the conference and call: www.scaleupinstitute.eu/event/scaleup-conference/  

Would you like to find out more or contribute to strengthening the European scaleup ecosystem? Feel free to reach out to us via info@scaleupinstitute.eu  

For more information about the institute, visit www.scaleupinstitute.eu