Open Innovation 2.0 Yearbook 2013 - European Commission - Europa

30 O P E N I N N O V A T I O N 2 0 1 3
1.3. Why is a European model for start-ups necessary?
This reflection on a model for European start-ups
is the result of work I have carried out in parallel
with my entrepreneurial activities. I have always
analysed and admired the success of Silicon Valley,
the ultimate benchmark in the field of innovation.
At the same time, I have strived to develop
a strong ecosystem for Paris and for Europe. Ten
years’ work in the corporate and non-profit sectors
has taught me that Europe needs to build its own
model, rather than aping Silicon Valley. Here, I aim
to provide a brief summary of this vision of the
European start-up scene.
The European Web start-up scene has already yielded
several gems — Spotify, SoundCloud, Rovio and Dailymotion,
to name but a few. The talent and ambition
of European entrepreneurs are a genuine inspiration.
However, the one thing that all these European startups
have in common is not so much their European
origin as their immediate similarities with Silicon Valley,
or at least evidence of the influence of the Californian
ideal of a young innovative company. As an
inveterate entrepreneur and the instigator of alternative
models such as the La Cantine and PARISOMA
co-working spaces and the Le Camping incubator [1]
in France, I note that despite the success of these
initiatives, the model still remains Californian.
Having been nurtured at Le Camping, the most
promising projects apply to join Silicon Valley startup
incubators, primarily Y Combinator and 500
start-ups. This is hardly surprising considering the
projects they have produced: Airbnb, Reddit and
Dropbox with the former, and Wildfire, 9Gag and
Twilio with the latter.
The reason for this is simple — there is no European
identity for start-ups, nor are there any strong links
between digital entrepreneurs in Europe. We don’t
work together, or at least not enough. The first comment
when the subject is addressed is invariably
‘Which is the best European city for Web entrepreneurs?’
And the response differs according to blogs
and rankings: London, Berlin, Moscow, Paris, Amsterdam,
Stockholm — all dynamic cities engaged in
misguided one-upmanship without any real sense
of healthy competition or collaboration. Basically,
the concept of European ecosystems is meaningless
other than in an abstract political sense.
And this is because the model still remains that of
Silicon Valley and the American culture. So much so
that Europeans need to go to San Francisco to meet
one another!
However, the existence of a high concentration of
innovative players in an area is not the sole preserve
of Silicon Valley. Israel is currently the second-ranking
country for NASDAQ-listed companies.
And this hotbed of entrepreneurialism is a big hit
with the top Californian venture capitalists, as
revealed in this comment by Dror Berman, a former
engineer and founder of the Innovation Endeavours
investment fund, which should be a lesson to the
Old Continent: ‘We need to encourage Israelis to go
out and acquire knowledge and build networks in
other countries, and provide the incentives needed
to ensure that the best entrepreneurs and investors
from around the world see Israel as a key and
natural partner for technological development’ [2].
This offers further proof that necessity is the
mother of innovation and risk-taking, since with
8 million inhabitants Israel does not have the internal
market required to support its start-ups and
is immediately forced to look to the international
market. This prime necessity gives it an edge over
Europe, and particularly France, which is historically
torn between contradictory geographical projections.
As Maurice Aymard argues, following in the
footsteps of Fernand Braudel, France is the result
of an ‘original three-way division of a space contested
between the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and
Europe’ [3].
How can we explain this lack of
identity for European start-ups?
Incomparable markets
Unlike Silicon Valley, Europe is difficult to define as
a market. From the Urals to the Strait of Gibraltar,
common characteristics are hard to find on a continent
which has been marked significantly by its onerous
industrial history. The language barrier is a real
constraint. Making a website available in 23 languages
(the number of official languages in the European
Union) is a costly and complex task, destroying
the responsiveness demonstrated by these start-ups.
After this first obvious barrier, the most striking thing
is the wide range of behaviour and contexts. While
Finnish and Czech companies achieved 20 % of their
turnover from e-commerce in 2011, this figure was
just 5 % for Italian companies [4].
The absence of a European scale
European start-ups are identified on the scale
of cities. Like the city-states of Ancient Greece,
Europe does not represent a coherent melting pot
for young companies. The scales which exist are
the city, the country and, finally, the global market,