Relationship between investors and European startup ecosystems builders

Abstract

Currently the world's economies are facing great challenges in the creation of employment, especially due to the transformation of the employment structure associated to the technological progress and globalization of organizations. To address this issue, entrepreneurship has been increasingly used by policy-makers in developed economies as a central element in their policies to promote economic growth. While entrepreneurship is now considered to be a key element in growth-oriented policies, there exists a need for a larger foundation of knowledge about how to develop successful entrepreneurship ecosystems. This paper aims to characterize the investor groups' perceptions towards ecosystem builders in European startup ecosystems, with particular attention to the aspects of the ecosystem builders' contribution to startups and to the cooperation between ecosystem builders and investor groups. This investigation is composed by an extensive literature review to startup ecosystems and ecosystem actors, and by an empirical study to investor groups' perception concerning to this subject. To acquire empirical data it was conducted an online questionnaire directed to a sample of investor groups located in Portugal, U.K. and Germany. Our findings suggest that the aspects of the ecosystem builders' contribution towards startups that investor groups most value are startup screening, entrepreneurial education and access to mentoring. As for the cooperation between ecosystem builders and investor groups the results showed that there exists room for improvement, especially with regard to communication and information sharing.