Startup Gathering 2015 National SG Forum Report by Startup Commons

Valto Loikkanen & Oscar Ramirez

25th of November 2015

Startup Commons Report on BreakOut Sessions

Startup Commons Global www.startupcommons.org @startupcommons

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Table Of Contents

Executive Summary Startup Commons

Overview Of Startup Commons Model Startup Gathering 2015 Getting The Fundamentals Right

Focus, Processes & Procedures During Breakout Sessions Year 1 of the countdown to becoming a global startup hub by 2020 Focusing On The Early Part Of The Ecosystem Overview of how the Breakout Sessions operated Some Observations from Breakout Sessions

Key Findings and Recommendations for the Cities Key Findings for Dublin Key Findings for Waterford Key Findings for Cork Key Findings for Limerick Key Findings For Galway Conclusions from the City Forum Breakout Sessions Comparisons between the findings from the Startup Gathering Breakout Sessions and other leading startup ecosystems

Recommended Next Steps for the Cities Goal 1: Identify and build mutual understanding of the current stage of local ecosystem Goal 2: Build a shared vision among different stakeholders Goal 3: Plan & Budget Goal 4: Define the measurements at local level Goal 5: Take these metrics to grass root level via in government supports or supported activities Goal 6: Empower local key people and organizations

Recommended Next Steps at the National Level Goal 1: Proposed Framework Ecosystem Roles Communication Among Stakeholders


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The Role Of Government Balanced Development Framework Defining Objectives and Actionable Items Goal 2: Establish a shared vision for the national strategy Goal 3: National Steering Group Goal 4: DataDriven Approach Goal 5: Increasing startups volume

Appendix Appendix 1.

Some references for Startup Manifestors Appendix 2.

Startup Commons Presentation at Startup Gathering event Appendix 3.

Moderator Briefing Appendix 4.

Attached raw data from the Breakout Session


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Executive Summary

Over the last two decades many countries have recognized that highgrowth, innovationbased businesses are important drivers for economic growth. A growing number of governments have responded by launching programs to systematically invest in the creation and support of highgrowth companies. The Irish Government launched the country’s first Entrepreneurship Strategy in October 2014 with the aim of Ireland becoming recognised as a place where good ideas can be transformed into excellent businesses, where new jobs will be created as international investors and entrepreneurs seek Ireland out as a location of choice. This bold vision involves a strong need to significantly increase the number of people choosing entrepreneurship as a career choice in Ireland, this vision required more people in Ireland’s cities starting great business opportunities that then become the next generation of scaling companies. Startup Commons and the Startup Gathering As part of the national Startup Gathering our organisation were commissioned to prepare and run breakout sessions in 5 cities. These breakout sessions were a starting point in the process of each city better understanding the strengths of their startup ecosystem and how to strengthen it. Equally the goal was to provide an initial trigger for each city to use the mechanism of a Startup Manifesto to accelerate the development of each city’s plan to strengthen its startup ecosystem and link with the national

vision for Ireland to become a global startup hub by 2020. There was significant preparation required in advance of the week of the Startup Gathering. The goal of each breakout session was to achieve consensus on what the key questions each city needed to ask in order to better understand the stage of development of its startup ecosystem. Methodology Breakout sessions enable teams to capture more information in less time. With strong active listening, the session leader (aka, moderator) sets up context and provides thorough reflection of participant input. Attendees are allocated into groups and are given permission to speak freely around one predefined topic. After all the findings were collected at the end of the breakout session and the key findings were summarised, Startup Commons team then shared the initial findings on stage with the broader audience at later part of the forum program. Regional Findings & Recommendations Our findings arising from the data generated by the breakout sessions in the five cities is that each city needs to:

Identify and build mutual understanding of the current stage of local ecosystem’s development.

Build a shared vision among different stakeholders in the city.

Define clear plan & budget.


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Empower local key people and organisations.

National Findings & Recommendations Our recommendations at a national level involve data capture, benchmarking and increased collaboration. The recommendations include:

Ireland needs to implement a common national framework to unify the startup ecosystems unique to each city in order to achieve the goal of becoming a global startup hub by 2020.

Establish a shared vision for the national strategy of becoming a global startup hub.

Strengthen national steering group to met all year round.

Implement datadriven startup ecosystem development approach.

Increase startups volume through direct action at the early stage of the startup ecosystem.

International Comparison based on Startup Commons experience Our experience offers these comparisons with other startups ecosystems:

Competing with other startup ecosystems for talent is a least preferred option. Instead, Ireland should look for ways of collaboration with them to strengthen its position globally

Analyse and adjust current resources in use to support startup ecosystem before investing in new and not implemented actions.

Focus on deeper understanding of interactions among users and stakeholders within the startup ecosystem. Therefore, connectivity becomes key priority to enable all these relationships.

Define the measurements at local level. Take these metrics to grass root level in

government subsidies or supported activities

Governments around the world are investing in digital infrastructure to enable startup ecosystem development

Policy ROI more measurable and transparent

Suggested Next Steps We saw that although irish startup ecosystem in general has implemented many components to generate a vibrant startup ecosystem, more alignment and coordination with local startup ecosystems is needed as a national startup ecosystem is the sum of their local and regional ecosystems. Having met the key stakeholders in each city during the Startup Gathering Forums we believe that the main next step is to take immediate action and implement a common framework that can act as the basis to accelerate Ireland’s transition from each city being an isolated regional ecosystem, competing with each other, to being a joint and collaborative effort. Within this framework each city retains its own local identity and smart use of resources to being creators of globally innovative companies. This common framework might be best achieved through the creation of a national Startup Manifesto for Ireland.


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Startup Commons

Entrepreneurship led innovation is a positive and powerful driver pushing societies across the world forward. Startups focus this drive and energy to create and validate new innovations to find solutions for problems at various scale. Startup Commons was founded in 2009 as a way to share knowledge on supporting startups. Startup Commons digital infrastructure was first created as Grow VC Networks in 2011, where diverse entrepreneurship communities within startup ecosystem needed a way to be connected to each other online in order to grow beyond the boundaries of a single organization, city, state, region, country or even continent.

The Startup Commons Global company (part of Grow VC Group) was officially formed in 2014 by serial and experienced entrepreneurs and leaders with a commitment to develop local startup ecosystems around the world. This commitment was made because the startup ecosystem concept has become the key element for the economic growth around the world as startups have been shown to be a massive contributor to economic growth and high value job creation over several decades and governments face several profound challenges that are hampering their growth and limiting regions' ability to benefit from the economic impact of innovative startups.

Overview Of Startup Commons Model Startup Commons Global focuses on scaling entrepreneurship and innovation by working with local, regional and national governments on empowering and enabling the development of startup ecosystems with free knowledge tools & resources, startup ecosystem development consulting and with digital infrastructure platform to connect, measure & monitor Startup ecosystems.

Resultsoriented governments are increasingly making use of primary data and statistical analysis to inform decisions and Startup Commons Global provides the infrastructure to help them shape economic policy discussions and operative challenges with the objective of better supporting the creation and growth of innovative startups to become globally significant companies as part of countries' much needed transformation to a knowledgeintensive economy.


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Dynamic startup ecosystems breed new startups that create 2/3 of new jobs, attract international talent and foreign direct investments. Network connectivity within and between the ecosystems is the single most important contributor for growth.

Startup Commons Global proposes three ways of evidencebased decision making in government:

1. Collecting credible activity and performance data to calculate ROI. 2. Benchmarking constantly between peers at all levels from individual companies and

services to local and national ecosystems. 3. Smart use of data to design and improve strategies and operations.

Startup Commons Global is committed to working closely with all parts of the startup ecosystem, including entrepreneurs, startups, investors, corporates, universities, researching entities, all startups supporting organizations and all levels of government, to develop and implement policies and programs to systematically grow a country’s startup ecosystem so that it can drive economic prosperity for future generations.

In our work we focus on scalable approaches, focusing on free distribution and common sharing of knowledge resources and tools, to operate at strategy and policy levels, consulting and training the trainers (teachers, advisors, policy makers, etc.) designing, implementing and iterating services models and via implementing digital infrastructure to connect, measure & monitor ecosystem activities and services processes in realtime. To extend our support at operational level, we work extensively with partner models from large multinational consulting companies and digital solution providers to smaller boutique expert houses, so that we can focus on providing value in our areas of expertise.

Startup Commons Global believes that proactively fostering economic diversification is an important part of the government’s role and this involves the development of each of the local/regional startup ecosystems, bearing in mind both their uniquenesses and similarities compared to other regions.


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Startup Gathering 2015

Getting The Fundamentals Right This paper covers the key findings from Startup Gathering Breakout Sessions in Dublin, Waterford, Cork, Limerick and Galway and it sets out actionable items based on analysis of each startup ecosystem and of the feedback and interactions from the attendees during the breakout sessions. Additionally, this report relays on information not only from the sessions themselves but also on materials and discussions from parallel discussions with different parties and stakeholders during Startup Gathering event.

Focus, Processes & Procedures During Breakout Sessions The theme of the Startup Gathering 2015 is about getting the fundamentals in place to build towards the goal of becoming a global startup hub by 2020, so if we get more people in our cities starting with great business opportunities then there will be the potential to have more startups scaling and succeeding from Ireland. Please see below the Startup Commons model of Startup Development Phases.


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The pipeline of successful established business starts with having a large quantity of good quality startups, please see the typical numbers needed below.

Year 1 of the countdown to becoming a global startup hub by 2020 Focusing On The Early Part Of The Ecosystem

Based on Startup Commons Startup Development Stages, while there are six key stages from startups perspective, there are three key segments from ecosystem development perspective to focus on: forming startups, validating startups and scaling startups. At this point, we are focusing on the beginning part “forming startups” of the ecosystem from startup development phases 2 to 0 range, with focus on how to improve the quality and volume of “Committed founding teams with aligned vision and high potential innovation“. Please note a broader definition for “Committed teams having aligned vision and high potential innovation“: For the purpose of the breakout sessions for the Startup Gathering 2015 the goal of the exercise is to produce more founding teams in each city that have the attributes listed below.

Committed founding team is:

Entrepreneurial core founding team of 23 Balanced ownership Balanced and complementary skills (design, build, sell) Shared mission and vision “Can do” attitude Confirmed with signed shareholder agreement with commitments and vesting

Pursuing a high potential business opportunity for:

Big addressable market AND/OR fast growing international market AND/OR big market in disruption


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High demand (market pull) Scalable business model Good market timing

Startup Commons, along with Startup Gathering team, focused on six key pillars required in the early stages of a startup’s development – environment, culture, skills, education, networks and state support, towards process of creating a Startup Manifesto for each city. A Startup Manifesto is a way to build a shared vision and cross community commitment under these 6 pillars to early stage startups in each city. The Startup Manifesto movement has gained traction across Europe, for links to some startup manifestos by other please see Appendix 1.

Overview of how the Breakout Sessions operated

The specific purpose of the breakout session was to help each city benchmark where its startup ecosystem is currently and start the process of improving it each breakout group considered:

1. Arrive at a series of questions (maximum 8) for each of the 6 themes that underpin

startup ecosystems (Environment, Culture, Skills, Education, Network, State Support).

2. Identify who are the best individuals, organisations, networks in each city that can help provide informed insights into those questions.

3. Use the above to create a survey, hold focus groups or some other approach with the aim of creating a draft Startup Manifesto by the end of November 2015 that can be shared at the Startup Gathering National Forum (scheduled for November 20th or 21st). Startup Manifestos typically contain a constructive set of goals to create a supportive environment for startups. A Startup Manifesto for your city can be 1 page or 30 pages, can be based on elements of existing startup strategies in the city, it is really up to your city to decide.

How the breakout session proceeded:

1. Along with Startup Commons overall presentation (see Appendix 2), Startup Commons team gave a short overview to attendees of how the breakout session would work during their talk.

2. Attendees were allocated into groups, to encourage new insights the people in each group will be from diverse backgrounds. There were highly visible boards for each of the 6 pillars of startup ecosystems, a Moderator and Rapporteur was allocated to each board. Moderator and Rapporteur were briefed beforehand about the breakout sessions (see Appendix 3).


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3. The Moderator needed to seek to achieve the following two goals in the allotted:

Breakout Group Activity Time Allotted

What are the questions we need to ask to identify where our city is currently in respect of early stage startups? Sample questions are provided in the detailed briefing below.

15 minutes

For each question who can help us answer these questions – specific individuals, organisations or networks.

15 minutes

4. At the end of the breakout session the participants returned to the auditorium for the next section of the Forum. The Rapporteur then compiled the key questions, any interesting points that arose and the people, organisations or networks that can help give insights on the questions in order to help compile a Startup Manifesto.

5. Startup Commons team facilitated the final discussion amongst the different groups asking to highlight 13 key findings from each of the groups and encouraged them to add additional comments to any of the groups

6. After all the findings were collected and the key findings were summarized, Startup Commons team then shared the initial findings on stage with the broader audience at later part of the forum program.

Some Observations from Breakout Sessions While observing the collecting of the findings and questions from the groups, there appeared to be very positive spirit and interest from the participants to contribute for the process as well as lively discussions about the key findings. It was also clear that instead of only collecting questions, many wanted to directly contribute with their ideas for improvements. Based on these observations we felt it was important to capture as much of the feedback, also in free format, as well as observe the cross topic discussions for most commonly shared findings and key challenges. As such our findings are reported also in both suggestion and question formats.


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In addition on focusing the feedback for city in question, we also took the approach to compare the collected findings between different cities and in national level context, to also find common topics and findings.


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Key Findings and Recommendations for the Cities

Below is a summary, based on the gathered information from each of the groups, of the key findings and proposed recommendations to address the goal of becoming Ireland a global startup hub by 2020 via cities startup ecosystem development.

Key Findings for Dublin In Dublin 137 people participated in the Breakout Session. The scanned notes from the breakout session are contained in the Appendix.

Dublin Startup Ecosystem breakout session

Breakout Group Topic

Key Needs in the startup ecosystem to improve the

pipeline of early stage startups

Whom to ask as to how to improve this?

Culture

Change mentality about how to celebrate failure and risk taking

code.org, ITC, Plato, WBS schools, Startups, Global Ambassadors, IBEC, Small Firms, Enterprise Ireland

Education

Embed entrepreneurship in early stages of the education system, increase awareness about successful and failure and train educators to deliver startup education. There must be coherency in all stages of the education system

Bank Of Ireland, Consultants, Cisco, Microsoft, 3rd level consultants, Intel

Skills

Strong need to boost both entrepreneurial and innovation skills as well as to balance general and mixed skills

Entrepreneurs, social networks, policy makers. education makers, enterprise office, innovation labs, successful + unsuccessful startups, VC community, angels, banks & other institutional institutions, large corporations, education providers, biz rep groups, professional membership bodies

Break silos, more visibility for Government's tax policy,


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Environment attracting growth capital and enable connectivity of "databases" for everyone's benefit

Enterprise Ireland, Dublin City Council, IBEC, Chambers of commerce, VC’s (international investors), multinationals (corporate ventures, corporate accelerators), media

Network

Poor communication and coordination amongst key startup supporting organizations for effective service delivery, matchmaking with key players and removing overlaps. One door shop, single portal approach is highly demanded

Government, Enterprise Ireland, Dublin City Council, startups, university, meetup groups, events organisers, service providers, big companies,

State Support

Greater safety addressed to compensate potential failures. Redefine startups + entrepreneurship concept to be more inclusive with social innovation projects

Governments (local, regional or national level), economic development agencies, innovation agencies, specialised companies on ecosystem development

Key Findings for Waterford In Waterford 85 people participated in the Breakout Session. The scanned notes from the breakout session are contained in the Appendix.

Waterford Startup Ecosystem

Key Pillar Key Needs in the startup ecosystem to improve the



Culture

Elaborate clear definitions about entrepreneurship, traditional businesses, startups and SMEs to bring common understanding and for better allocation of different resources. Celebration of Failure as a workshop/service to accelerate learnings along the startup community and reduce potential mistakes for future startups.

Startup Experts, Area Partnerships, Secondary school/WIT, Multinationals, People who have done it much more.


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Education

Educate key people within the ecosystem. Training of trainees: empower local players with increasingly startup ecosystem knowledge level and bring more effective support, early identification of talented people, etc.

Enterprise Ireland + LEO to foster entrepreneurship, Entrepreneur bus , People: skills net + chamber, Employers and business, Parents

Skills

More access to technologists, designers, etc to build MVPs

Serial entrepreneurs, startups, meetup groups,

Environment

Implement a physical hub in the centre of Waterford to showcase the real activity in the city and the range of available services

Government, Enterprise Ireland, Waterford City Council, media

Network

Lack of coordination amongst the key players that are actively supporting entrepreneurs and startups, more concretely between governments at different level (local, regional and national). Due to this, there are overlapping services, bottleneck, and from users perspective is quite difficult to identify which is the right service for the right moment. Therefore, an improvement in the communication level is needed and that basically means to increase levels of visibility of the available services, make them more transparent and accessible

Government, Enterprise Ireland, Waterford City Council, startups, meetup groups, events organisers, service providers, big companies, Bank Of Ireland

State Support

Bring more coordination at different levels (local, regional and national)

Dept. Social protection, LEO, Local authority/community development, Enterprise Ireland, Sectoral Experts, Dept. Education


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Key Findings for Cork In Cork 90 people participated in the Breakout Session. The scanned notes from the breakout session are contained in the Appendix.

Cork Startup Ecosystem




Culture

Better matchmaking between entrepreneurs, startups, etc to bring more global thinking and make failure more natural

Entrepreneurial organisations.

Education

Educate & train teachers about entrepreneurship and starting at early stages of the education system

Teacher training, Curriculum development units, Dept education, Coordinated model clustered regionally,

Skills

Support development skills about innovation and softskills (sales, pitching, business, etc.)

Entrepreneurs, policy makers, education makers, enterprise office, innovation labs, successful + unsuccessful startups, VC community, angels, large corporations, education providers, biz rep groups, professional membership bodies

Environment

One stop shop approach and implementing infrastructure (physical and virtual) for better connectivity

Cork Chamber, Existing stakeholders across the research bodies: UCC; Tyndall; Beaufort; Alimentary; CIT; Nimbus; Hincks; imerc; Moorepark etc Steering committee, Government

Network

Bring national database for more effective matchmaking

Chamber, BIC, EI, Banks, Universities.


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State Support

Better connectivity amongst key stakeholders in the ecosystem and benchmarking from other regions


Key Findings for Limerick In Limerick 68 people participated in the Breakout Session. The scanned notes from the breakout session are contained in the Appendix.

Limerick Startup Ecosystem




Culture Need to promote awareness and acceptance of failure.

Entrepreneurial organisations, LEOs.

Education

Embed entrepreneurship education at all levels of the education system and start in early stages. There must be coherency in all stages of the education system

LEO, Third level institutions, POST professional services for primary & second level teachers.

Skills

Challenge of competing with big companies for skills/talent

Employees group, Third level institutions, Skillnets, Enterprise Ireland, Guidance Counseller org, IDA, Parents

Environment

Physical manifestation to visualize startups activities, services, etc. (both offline and online)

Government's tax policy, Enterprise Ireland, Limerick City Council, IBEC, Chambers of commerce, VC’s (international investors), multinationals (corporate ventures, corporate accelerators), media

Visual mapping and relevant Lower level clusters, Education


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Network connections to encourage more people to engage.

centres, Startup Gathering website, LEAP Program, Peer to Peer

State Support

Not penalizing from financial perspective and support entrepreneurs long enough and aligned to ambition level

Department of social protection, dept DJEI, Finance, Dept of Communications, Chambers, IBEC, SFA, ISME, MISC

Key Findings For Galway

In Galway 64 people participated in the Breakout Session. The scanned notes from the breakout session are contained in the Appendix.

Galway Startup Ecosystem




Culture

Building confidence to start and being proud to be an entrepreneur, handling failure and embedding self starter mindset

Entrepreneurial organizations

Education

Entrepreneurial education in all context (full cycle learning from ideation to validation (also failure)) and attract more women entrepreneurs

Government – Educators, Parents. Universities/Teaching schools with government involvement and local integration. Umbrella organizations (Chamber of commerce, EI, IDA, NUIG, EMET, Startup Galway, IRL, Banks, Lawyers etc.) Teaching associations.

Skills

Improve understanding of business model thinking (entrepreneurial module)

Entrepreneurs, policy makers, education makers, enterprise office, innovation labs, successful + unsuccessful startups, VC community, angels, large corporations,


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education providers, biz rep groups, professional membership bodies

Environment

Having available entrepreneurship as a career option and bring more understanding and better appreciation about SMEs, startups and entrepreneurs value to the economy.

Government, Chamber of Commerce, GCID, Galway City Council, Banks, Education, Media, Industry Group, 3rd Lead Recruitment Company, NUIG, EMIT, Startup Ireland, Gov Agencies, IBEC

Network

Teaching skills for networking and connecting different networks

Entrepreneurs, large companies, Junior chamber of commerce

State Support

Better understanding of all support, programs and funding instruments, as

well as Government’s role


Conclusions from the City Forum Breakout Sessions Based on our experience in working with cities internationally and our direct experience during the Startup Gathering forums our conclusions are:

Communities, in general, understand what their needs are better than any outside organization. Otherwise, it could have risk of not getting their own ideas brainstorming to happen if they just take on external recommendations directly, that could then potentially lower their commitment. Therefore, developing each city’s startup ecosystem requires a substantial amount of feeling of belonging and engagement and empowering local people and organizations with right knowledge, tools and resources is key to build a flourish startup ecosystem.

Different parties and stakeholders look at the startup ecosystem from different

perspective, as they are operating and contributing at different stages, using different terminology, having own understanding and looking at the ecosystem as a whole in a very particular and individual way, with their own definition about the meaning of successful startup ecosystem. Alignment across these different players is needed for the startup ecosystem in each city to deliver to its full potential.

Definitions When people in the cities discussed their startup ecosystem it was

generally along the lines of mixed concepts such as solo entrepreneurs, family businesses, micro companies, small & medium companies and startups. To make


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real progress in each city each of these concepts demand concrete needs, they require clear understanding of the stages through they are moving along the way and they require specific support and effective coordination among the different supporting players for each of these concepts as these entities are dynamic organizations by nature, being most likely to find connections among these concepts.

Silos Reducing Effectiveness There is a clear across all the cities amongst those

working in local startup supporting organisations that many stakeholders are working in silos, causing people and organizations to miss the big picture. They understand that in order to affect real change, they need to break the walls, work collaboratively with businesses, nonprofits, and other government agencies but this is not happening in a real sense. What is important in such scenarios is creating bridges across silos, improving communication level between organizations and ensuring that they are working efficiently toward the same goals: to develop innovative startups.

Overlapping Services With some organizations there can be clear change from the

services available from one stage to stage during the startup key stages, and in many cases there are also overlapping processes for different stages of the startups development.

Lack of Understanding There is important information deficit amongst key decision

makers and stakeholders about the key conditions for creating and developing a globally competitive startup ecosystem. Some of the factors that are causing that:

There are multiple sources (mostly, secondaries). Long time and high cost data gathering process. Real (but time consuming) vs guesstimated data testing process. Different terminology leading to misunderstandings. Big Speed Gap between reality and data: High startup environment vs Low

data gathering process. Big difficulties about what to measure and how.

Where does your data come from? Data comes (with as significant manual effort)

from secondary sources of information and this involves each city has to validate the information (real vs guesstimated data). Moreover, each local startup supporting program has a strong dependence on these sources of information and its level of accuracy depends on the frequency sources of information update their data (yearly in many cases) so, apart of being slow and consuming process, there is risk each city has outdated data as startup world is very dynamic and things are dramatically changing all the time.


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Related to last point, analytics and visualization of the data is another big area to improve as this can help all stakeholders appreciate what is working and what needs to improve in their startup ecosystem.

A holistic view of each city’s startup ecosystem is needed to focus, from policy

makers perspective, on different players and elements that are directly impacting in the overall performance of the ecosystem, identifying strengths and weaknesses, key roles, setting measurable objectives and actions to be achieved over the next five years and to properly showcase the city as a hub to communicate what’s happening in your city as the best marketing campaign to attract people, talent, investments, etc. and to benchmark your activities with other comparable cities and their startup ecosystem.

Startup Ecosystem is one open innovation model. Open innovation is facilitated by

open, fluid, and dynamic networks that are both informal and formal. Network connectivity has been identified as being the single most important contributor to growth. Networks depend on the interfaces being available from the key enablers so that startups can rapidly connect with the right person the first time. Network connectivity is a function of density (physical proximity of the key enablers of scaling for a startup) and velocity (the speed with which the startup can align and progress through the enablers) at the core of the Open Innovation nexus. This in turn attracts investors to the hub as enablers.

Volume & Scalability. Also, getting a high volume of business ideas in the early

stages of the ecosystem is key to get more successful startups. In general, focusing on overall volume means each local startup ecosystem has to manage more information so the scalability factor becomes critical and managing such huge of information highlights problems like managing spreadsheets, limited customization options, no or limited connectivity to partners, measuring results is difficult or time consuming, etc. Ultimately in this situation the startup ecosystem management system is more prone to error.

The interface between startups and MNCs Large corporates are moving more

towards open innovation, coinnovation and simply buying validated innovation. This is achieved by buying new startups (acquihires) after they have validated their innovations in open markets to further scale those with their customer base and market reach, to get overall better results, more cost effectively. This means that big companies are making less investments to internal market validation efforts and also means that more and more innovation is happening via startups. To react to this development the availability and access to specially government funded R&D should be improved significantly to make it more accessible for startups to utilize and also find interesting new innovations by combining multiple interesting R&D findings.


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Comparisons between the findings from the Startup Gathering Breakout Sessions and other leading startup ecosystems

The Startup Commons participation in the Startup Gathering Forum breakout sessions was delivered in a relatively short process with limited input, exposure and dialogue beyond the Breakout Sessions themselves. While taking the above into account we highlight below some key aspects that should be taken into account when comparing Ireland’s startup ecosystems with other regions globally:

1. Every region has its own societies, cultures, history of technology, etc. and because of that, each region uses own metrics at its convenience to lead ranking lists. Ireland should work to collaborate with those regions and countries of complementary resources and characteristics to find a way to attract talent, money, and projects across startups ecosystems. Proximity with UK provides a significant opportunity particularly in the FinTech area. It is quite common that Irish startups look at UK as an attractive market to seek investment and once they get it, Ireland, as a startup ecosystem, can lose these assets and this reduces the return for Ireland on the early stage development of startup talent. Rather than compete against this reality Ireland needs to think about how to tap into this scenario and get the most of it. Malaysia and Singapore are implementing a similar approach, capitalising on its global reach and platform for mobility in a collaborative way.

2. Policymakers in Ireland may be missing accurate data on key components of the

early stages of the startup ecosystem that are feeding their top level numbers and indicators. This may prevent policy makers having accurate data on the rapidly changing, multistakeholder startup environment. Implementing a “startups world adapters” approach such as the cities below is effective and pragmatic way to rigorously track startup ecosystem performance, identify obstacles early, solve problems, and correct course. Berlin, London, New York, and Tel Aviv are cities that stand out for their vibrant startup ecosystems. London started its Tech City initiative in 2010; New York and Tel Aviv have established New York Digital City and Startup City Tel Aviv. In 2014, Berlin started implementing several similar initiatives.

3. One smarter way to start improving the current startup ecosystem level is by

benchmarking current resources in use to support startups, identifying inefficient processes and services and properly adjusting them for effective and cost efficient allocation. Questions like ‘What is going on in the startup ecosystem’, ‘Who is doing what and why?’, Where and when are things happening? and How do we get in on it all? are frequently wondered by cities and regions across US and Europe in order to


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help startups get the right services and connections at the right time, and to help public sector decision makers as well as both public and private service providers tailor their services to the specific needs of the startups and other ecosystem actors. Countries like Finland and Estonia are moving towards that direction to achieve more resource effectiveness.

4. Traditional methods used to assess startup ecosystems have focused on achieving a

supportive entrepreneurial culture, incubation and acceleration services, risk capital, talent attraction, etc. but just a few (the most developed ecosystems) are taking into account the significant interactions between these elements and their evolution over time. In such a scenario, enabling connectivity is key. By enabling connectivity, they allow startups to enhance learning between them, they build list of experienced local people to connect them to people with little experience. Equally more advanced startup ecosystems are enabling more collaboration between organizations supporting startups by constant readjustment with the local ecosystem and startups. To achieve this these support organizations are manned by people with entrepreneurial experience which brings more understanding of the reality at grass root level.

5. As new technological paradigms emerge and data becomes more large scale, more

available, and more complex, the ability to support a growing digital economy requires a smart and proactive response. Many developed countries (France, UK, Estonia, Canada, US, Finland) are investing in holistic and integrated digital infrastructure to provide:

a. Policy Frameworks for coordination and alignment of various components of the startup ecosystem, the suitability of funding systems and the capacity to deal with other international startup ecosystems.

b. Expertise and Skills for effective use of the einfrastructure. c. Tools and Services through frontend solutions and human support services

that enable Government to derive value from their data and to optimize the startup ecosystem performance.

d. Data Management– the collecting, structuring, standardizing, archiving, and sharing of data, while ensuring flexibility, security, accessibility, interoperability, affordability, and high performance of the system.

e. Networking between different actors and players. f. Collaboration to connect with both domestic and foreign ecosystems.


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Recommended Next Steps for the Cities The following objectives have been derived from the work of the Breakout Sessions and on our experience of working with startup ecosystems internationally.

Goal 1: Identify and build mutual understanding of the current stage of local ecosystem

Recommended action Mapping City Startup Ecosystem Run workshop sessions to help find unified terminology to build shared understanding of the process and to establish the starting point by identifying available and missed services and activities, bottlenecks and overlapping services.

Impact Impact Level: Urgent Expected outputs will benefit all parties (both private and public) in the ecosystem.

Milestones Visualise the collected information This approach would take current city startup ecosystem map that Startup Ireland have created as part of the Startup Gathering to the next level by providing a brand new layer that enables the matching with right services and connections at the right time for all users in the ecosystem and intelligence for both public sector decision makers and both public and private service providers. From the startups point of view, the ability to identify a list of ecosystem services provides a clearer sense about what is available to effectively support them and which services are offered. From the ecosystem builders point of view: ability to create/edit ecosystem entries (ie organizations,

services & communities) and to start globally promoting the ecosystem. The ecosystem view could potentially display those organisations that can best help early stage startups and include information such as:

Organization logo, Name and Description of Organization.

Startup Stages the organization caters for.

Ability to filter the list of organizations in relation to selected criterias (industry, startup stages, etc.).

Ability to search the startups that the organizations on the list currently support or have supported in the past.

Ability to display general metrics about the ecosystem (Number of organizations; Number of Startups; Number of Members)

International Comparisons As global references, places like New York City viaDigital NYC and Estonia via Startup Estonia program have already implemented this approach. This is also the approach that City of Helsinki is currently working on, bringing responses and responsiveness regarding what is going on in the startup ecosystem, who are doing what and why, where and when are things happening, how we get in on it all, etc.


Part of the

http://www.digital.nyc/

http://www.digital.nyc/

http://www.startupestonia.ee/#startup_ecosystem



Goal 2: Build a shared vision among different stakeholders

Recommended action Create a Startup Manifesto for Each City A Startup Manifesto is a way to build a shared vision and cross community commitment to keep parties aligned in order to achieve the planned results. Startup Manifestos typically contain a constructive set of goals to create a supportive environment for startups. A Startup Manifesto should set the ambitious vision of making each city the startup capital for their area of specialisation in Ireland as a first short term objective, the ideal place to start and grow a startup in that area of specialisation. The Manifesto’s vision, while mediumterm in its aspiration, can be achieved by taking a planned approach to supporting the infrastructure of the startup ecosystem, addressing sectoral gaps and building neighbourhood entrepreneurial capacity. This approach will ensure that the key facets of the startup ecosystem are supported and that a divide is not created between certain sectors or scales of economic development.

Impact Impact Level: Urgent Expected outputs will benefit all parties and, as a deliverable, it is smart tool to effectively communicate and connect with key players within the ecosystem and other domestic/international ecosystems. Well aligned to EU policies

Milestones

City SWOT analysis to be carried out post the Startup Gathering.

Startup Manifesto created and published, containing shared vision, clear goals, milestones, actionable items and indicators.


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Goal 3: Plan & Budget

Recommended action Secure Budget and set up City Steering Group Startup Ecosystem Development can’t be implemented requires long term commitment of group of experts drawn from the locality who oversee the startup ecosystem implementation project to ensure that the roadmap is followed and provide advice and troubleshoot where necessary.

Impact Impact Level: Urgent It is good practice to include a good mix of members of the public and private side on a steering group. Their role is to provide input based on their direct experience of each of the pillars of the startup ecosystem development. The steering group usually meets at key stages/milestones during the course of the project and influences strategic decisions.

Milestones Resourcing activities preparation:

Secure Budget Team recruitment & set up Definition of Roles Management tools


Part of the



Goal 4: Define the measurements at local level

Recommended action Design and Develop Startup Ecosystem Metrics Database The aim is to help understand how to start to measure the various parts, services and activities within the ecosystem and how to prioritize those based on the city the current level of the Startup Ecosystem and considering other local factors like culture and ways the current support mechanics and funding for support activities are structured.

Impact Impact Level: High “Only things that can be measured, can be improved”. It directly impacts at governmental level to help bring more understanding and transparency to the ecosystem in order to improve the overall efficiency by making smart decisions to effectively allocate budgets for supporting new organizations, services, activities, etc.

Milestones Startup Ecosystem Metrics List It is prioritized by ROI that will give a clear vision to start implementing metrics in place and provide different scenarios to collect needed data for set of metrics.


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Goal 5: Take these metrics to grass root level via in government supports or supported activities

Recommended action Set up, Deploy and Develop Digital Infrastructure Services and functionalities roadmap to implement selected metrics. After starting to move to implementation and data collection, there will still be many opportunities (and needs) to adjust metrics, also in regards how other development activities progress, like implementing new services, events, getting service organizations up to speed with the need to measuring things etc. and based on that the "easy to implement" value will continue to vary.

Impact Impact Level: High Startup ecosystems are complex systems and, above all, no one organization can control the ecosystem as the startup journey is unpredictable, interacting with different organizations, services, activities or processes, whether at local level or beyond your borders. Mapping the ecosystem via digital infrastructure brings transparency and enables connectivity and the likelihood of creating interactions increases and therefore, the value created within the ecosystem does as well.

Milestones

Getting standardised information from the leading data sources, displaying this reliable content in an easytouse format.

Once the ecosystem is mapped digitally there is the ability to find and analyse key developments. Historical data is then available, providing you with the ability to capture emerging trends, as well as changes in the locations of your choice.

Delivering powerful, independent outputs in minutes, significantly reduces response time to investors, corporates and other relevant stakeholders with a solid, datadriven business proposition.

Ability to input into key policy makers’ recommendations with actual local ecosystem data


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Goal 6: Empower local key people and organizations

Recommended action Build the ‘Training of Trainers’ Program in each city Provide intensive and practical training programmes on enabling highly innovative startups. Structure the training to provide the core knowledge and skills necessary to local people and organizations in each city who will not only be able to facilitate greater numbers of successful innovative startups, but will also be able to train others in conducting successful innovation work. The topics would be related to elements that are core for “forming startups” such as what is startup entrepreneurship, startup key stages, team building, IPRs, vision, mission, strategy etc. Special emphasis here is also on the development of better services for new innovative startups for example development of incubation/acceleration programs, creation of new services and activities for existing programs, planning of a new funding program in the city, connecting researching services to existing startup ecosystem, etc.

Impact Impact Level: High Strengthen the ecosystem by unlocking local people and organizations’ potential and bring the way to scale startup ecosystem concepts, experiences and learnings.

Milestones

Training of Trainers Curriculum document.

Dissemination of Two eBooklet’s Building Innovative Startup,

for startup teams Advising Innovative Startups,

eBooklet for trainers, mentors & advisors


Part of the



Recommended Next Steps at the National Level

Goal 1: Proposed Framework The challenge is to create a step change in each of the cities in the pipeline of committed startup teams which have aligned vision and high potential innovation in their startup offerings. In order to get successful transformations as fast as possible, each city requires a “learningbydoing” approach, leveraging the intimate link between knowledge and experience.

Ecosystem Roles As startup ecosystems are an organic function comprising many different organizations, individuals and key stakeholders, it is key to form functioning models and frameworks to facilitate sustained collaborative and shared work between parties, from top down and bottom up approaches. This framework needs to include clearly defined roles like connectors, coordinators, moderators, hosts ete. These roles typically need to go beyond official organization based roles. These often unofficial key roles and responsibilities need to be identified, accepted by individuals, as well as mutually understood and supported by parties involved with ecosystem development. Typically these roles emerge as part of forming steering groups or working groups around commonly agreed needed focus areas or topics. While these often unofficial (and often also separately unpaid) roles may not be so clear, having individuals take on these roles are highly important for the ecosystem development and in connecting and synchronizing cross organization activities, knowledge and processes. Also these roles should be considered so that it’s quite common that the individual taking on these responsibilities are often changing due natural evolution of other roles in ecosystem. So taking that into account, persons accepting these roles, should commit on a personal level to carry these types of roles as long as needed or if no longer being able to carry on the role, to make sure there is another person taking on the responsibility.


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Communication Among Stakeholders It is very important that common understanding, learnings and progress about ecosystem development is communicated periodically between all key stakeholders in systematic manner and that bottom up and top down approaches are kept well informed and in sync. It is also natural that due to startup ecosystems having many functions and roles with varying perspectives, it’s not always easy to find common understanding on all topics. In our experience it’s important for the stakeholders to keep in mind the bigger context and bigger ecosystem targets being worked on that bring value for all parties. It’s also important to use commonly agreed targets and a startup manifesto as tools to help keep parties aligned, as well as commonly agreed methods for prioritizing development items and activities. A simple generic prioritizing method is to prioritize items with highest impact and least effort first, continuing with high impact but more effort.

The Role Of Government In light of the fact that startup ecosystems are very organic and individuals and organizations roles change and progress over time within it, local and national government’s key role is to focus resourcing and maintaining long term and sustainable progress, as well as to take on understanding the top coordinating role at ecosystem level, as well as focusing on developing the digital and physical infrastructures needed for ecosystem functions.

In this initial stage, from our perspective, much of its role in helping orchestrate the local startup ecosystem as a whole and to focus on connecting and identifying ways to constantly improve the volume of committed startup teams having aligned vision between the team members and high potential innovation. This measurement should be based on first hand information and real measurable primary data from the organizations that were highlighted from the Breakout Session output, not to just individual views, opinions or vanity metrics that have very limited relevance for measurable output, as one can only improve what can be measured.

One of the key things to develop each startup ecosystem as a whole and focusing on Startup Gathering 2015 goals is to have enough data, a big portion of activities and services focusing on between 2 and 0 phases in place that are measured from these stages of the development, services provided and measured on different stages of “forming startups”. Therefore, a smart and fast way to move the startup ecosystem forward to next level is implementing basic metrics and having a common communication framework in place in order to start collecting real data based on interactions and activities amongst different stakeholder to further analyze and accelerate the iterative ongoing ecosystem development


Part of the



in a balanced manner to further improve on overall volume. In addition it’s also important to define and maintain the interfaces and benchmarking between other cities internationally and to coordinate activities between national government agendas.

Balanced Development Framework Developing startup ecosystems is multidimensional and involves seemingly independent but connected activities and processes as well as multiple organizations and stakeholders with varying focuses and agendas. Also as a startup ecosystem acts as a great concept for communicating complex connections, via “ecosystem thinking” it’s easy to understand that activities like policy, services model or funding instrument aimed for specific area of the ecosystem, it may also have unintentional side effects to some other part of measure of the ecosystem elsewhere. This is one challenge balanced ecosystem framework as a concept helps to bring to attention, while in addition is helping to bring focus to planning, prioritizing and measuring objectives and actionable items. So it’s important to have a holistic framework to help develop the ecosystem is balanced manner, to start understanding the connections, relations and impacts of various actions and policies, as well as to have a framework to communicate on what area a specific action is targeted to be able to also measure the impact of specific actions. From the stakeholders perspective a startup ecosystem can be analysed into four top level segments; economic development (ecosystem / policy level), service organizations (operative level activities from private & public side) and customer level that also further divided to startup companies (of various stages) and individuals (talent, entrepreneurs, startup team, angel investors etc.). While from these groups they can be further divided into national and regional levels, as well as for private & public services organizations with various different services from universities to venture capital organizations and to big corporations, as well as also in person levels at various positions they represent. However, segmenting into these four levels is helpful to communication and to group the various top level agendas and activities first and from there forward to then look deeper to more specific agendas with various sublevels.


Part of the



The support organization level is the key operational driver of the knowledge, activities and connections that are needed to support the volume, quality and velocity of specific parts or customers within the ecosystem. Depending on their own motivators, targets, metrics and funding, they have very specific role and functions within specific parts in the ecosystem. While there are common targets, there can also be targets, that sometimes seem to create even unintentional competitive activities between various service organizations. In the private sector this can be seen as good sign, but between private and public or between two public organizations, it should be avoided or at least managed properly. Their agendas are driven by their own (set) targets, that is mostly measured by the success of the startups and people they serve. However they should also have more specific short term targets that can be also better measured within a shorter cycle. It is very important that while there is a “unifying” big visions and targets (that everyone in the ecosystem can share and benefit from), those alone can not motivate targeted behaviour. These targets need to be aligned with the agendas and motivators of each stakeholder and at level of targets (being that ecosystem level or national level etc.)


Part of the



Once these have been fully understood and various groups, agendas and motivations (obvious and hidden) are taken into account, the communications can be designed so that it’s reaching the right audiences and is resonating with them the right way as planned. It is also very important to make sure national agenda is in sync with regional agendas as well as grassroots drivers with the public sector, in a way that both take care of their natural roles, there is common understanding of these roles and that each focus on taking care of those responsibilities that naturally fit for them and that they can actually handle i.e. have the resources and budgets to do things, can sustain the positions needed to be sustained, can make unbiased decisions as needed, can actually make decisions required, but with enough understanding of the target impact and potential side effects. From this position and understanding it’s then possible to start focusing and planning actual objectives and actionable items to start developing ecosystem from various perspectives and to then divide roles and responsibilities by applying the logic above to take into account what responsibility is natural for what type of party or group etc. For defining objectives, to prioritizing them and to ultimately measure their impacts and potential side effects, Startup Commons has created a balanced development framework that helps if targeting various activities and measuring the impact of these activities, but also to better understand the relations between different areas.


Part of the



This framework can be used both in each of the three key focus areas “forming startups (2 to 0)”, validating startups (02)” and “scaling startups (2+)” separately, but also at the entire ecosystem level as a whole. The framework helps to capture all the key categories of items to be improved, as well as the value types to be measured and improved, in such way that the correlations between items and specifically the side effects can be identified from the index results. Item categories are (vertical)

Innovation (problems, research, ideas, concept, products). Talent (entrepreneurial people, attitude, skills, passion etc.). Entrepreneurship (mission, vision, culture, values, etc.). Support (knowledge, services, education, workforce etc.). Money (funding/revenue; grants, investments, sales). Growth (growth in “everything”, in volumes, quality and velocity, in companies, in go

to market, channels, international networks, jobs, etc.). Values to improve are (horizontal)

Volume methods to improve: culture building, communications & marketing, etc. Quality methods to improve: knowledge, guidance & feedback loops, etc. Velocity methods to improve: tools & processes, matching etc. ROI (budget/resources vs output) methods to improve: measuring, analysing,

strategy & orchestrating Initially it is easiest to focus on volume measures, next quality measures, following velocity measures and finally the return on investments (ROI). This framework helps to visualize but also limits the key areas to focus on for each of the objectives being created or to reevaluating, adjust etc. objects, activities, budgets already in place, in such way that the overall view for what is being improved never gets lost. Ie. each of the objectives should focus on improving some of the items and values from this framework. Under each of the category there can be as many objects that need to be implemented as necessary, but it also helps to identify a clear balance between focus on different items, simply by comparing where it is intended that current and planned effort will be targeted. While systematic approaches for identifying, measuring and developing startup ecosystems are still relatively new concepts overall, by applying this framework model it is easier to map various activities in various ecosystems. This enables stakeholders to see what is working and what needs improvement. It also helps identify the “visible/known” part of a startup


Part of the



ecosystem, while also highlighting at the same time some other key parts that may be very under developed. The balanced framework helps to bring understanding and focus for planning, prioritizing and measuring in ways that unintentional developments can be noticed faster and as such objects can be adjusted or new ones created to help balance the development to improve the overall output. The Balance Development framework is loosely based on the widely known balanced scorecard thinking and methology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_scorecard ). We have further developed and adapted it specifically to startup ecosystem development and management. It is initially a tool created internally by the Startup Commons team, it has been used and improved internally for several years. As such it’s been always used as part of our own work in connection to customers and markets we have worked with, being that from advisory work in Horizon 2020 programs to services design in different ecosystems etc. After enough internal validation we decided to launch it also as external tool and concept for our customers to also start using as a tool in their own work. And as such are rolling it out starting from end of 2015 along with existing customer projects as well as news ones from 2016 forward. The framework itself helps to keep all key development items in sight and to see their correlations, therefore it also helps to identify and group any existing objectives and metrics into an understandable framework. Together with Startup Development Phases document further targeting can be applied. At the same time Balanced Development Framework helps to create and maintain better framework to compare and benchmark different ecosystems.

Defining Objectives and Actionable Items To improve a startup ecosystem the first action to define the objective (what we want to improve and why). After having listed all objectives, those should be prioritised with some common logic like, how big of an impact with this objective have and how easy it is to implement (local definitions of impact and easy should be agreed), and then priority should be the highest for those with biggest positive impact with least effort to implement. Then defining more specifically what item and value is being improved with this objective (also can be more specifically in what part of startup development phase is this targeted/impacting), as well as how is that going to be measured. Once the measure is decided, it’s then needed to find the starting level value that can then be used to set target value that is going to be aimed for and/or how are some of the output/deliverables going to look like.


Part of the

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_scorecard



After this is about defining the how, to specify a specific initiative (actionable item), that can be then budgeted, resources and tracked by owner of this initiative, to make sure it actually happens and also to record the progress and ultimate results. This same approach can also be applied not only to new objectives but also to start benchmarking existing activities as well as any suggestions coming from any of the ecosystem stakeholders. By asking stakeholders to communicate using this approach, in ways that how is their suggestion going to be relevant for ecosystem as a whole as well as to compare to priorities already in the existing activities or planned activities list, will help ensure that any new ideas can be accelerated to be implemented sooner.

Startup Commons has so far refined more than 100+ key measurement points (that come as part of from actionable items), that are identified as key metrics of various activities and items around a startup ecosystem. At the same time various ecosystems have so far been able to start tracking only part of these identified key metrics and many are also forced to use manual collection methods while waiting for budgets to implement more automated and


Part of the



scalable long term solutions. Also, as part of defining and identifying new objectives, there are new metrics being identified at ongoing based, where part of Startup Commons role is also to help globally identify the most relevant top metrics to be used for global benchmarking purposes, so that the set of most important metrics keep developing and improving over time and are connected to Startup Commons digital infrastructure. For defining and managing new objectives and actionable items, Startup Commons has also developed online form with matching spreadsheet, to help submit/capture new actionable items and to manage their priorities and progress. Along with more customers starting to adopt the framework and these tools in their operations, 2016 Startup Commons will also start exploring ways to implement managing these objectives as part of Startup Commons digital infrastructure for tools targeted for ecosystem management level uses, along with actual data collection and metrics already available and in use in connection of the ecosystem explore portal and ecosystem office areas. That will also make it possible to start sharing and benchmarking the objectives and their results among ecosystem developers nationally and globally. As Startup Commons is now releasing these tools for broader use, they will also become of of our normal offering and models of sharing under creative commons so those can also collectively be improved by others as well over time.


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Goal 2: Establish a shared vision for the national strategy

Recommended action Strategy Workshop A national startup ecosystem is the sum of their local and regional startups ecosystems. The Startup Gathering event served to get a deeper understanding and to collect data and information at grassroots level from each of the cities that took part, being now a perfect moment to align all perspectives (city, regional and national level) by evaluating outcomes, reducing the gap and improving implement actions based on more accurate reality. Through workshop format, national government, national partners, sponsors, city coordinators and Startup Ireland team will clarify the target and measures of success, setting the milestone targets per each 6 months and outline the plan for first 12 months actions, with more detail in the first 6 months. Finally, they will set the check points to evaluate and adjust the progress

Impact Impact Level: Urgent The key stakeholders will join forces and work together to align visions and provide cohesion to the various framework conditions

Milestones Seek to create a national Startup Manifesto reflecting the regional and national goals for Ireland’s startup ecosystem by 2020.


Part of the



Goal 3: National Steering Group

Recommended action Internal recruitment process and external collaborations Implement national steering group to coordinate startup ecosystem development at national level. The team must grow to face multi dimensionals challenges as developing a national startup ecosystem requires moving different components in parallel and at different levels (designing, planning, coordination, measurement, training, etc.), keeping a constant communication with all stakeholders, benchmarking with other startups ecosystems globally and increasing startup ecosystem knowledge.

Impact Impact Level: High Better coordination at national level

Milestones

Challenges and roles identification Recruitment process Partnership models

Goal 4: DataDriven Approach

Recommended action Digital Ecosystem Infrastructure in place Datadriven startup ecosystem’s approach is the alternative that a region has when it is aware that it is impossible to replicate Silicon Valley startup ecosystem model. You as a region can’t adopt the same approach. You as a region can’t play with the same rules. Instead, one way to view Startup Ecosystems is to envision them like factories, helping to produce successful innovative startups, improving the efficiency and using the data to better serve and anticipate startups' needs. Similar global approaches are Citizen Dashboard City of Edmonton and DataasaService Pilot Project in Singapore

Impact Impact Level: High Datadriven startup ecosystem is the “doing more with less” approach to deliver maximum value to all stakeholders in the ecosystem, driving innovation and enhancing operations to enable flourish startup ecosystems and build prosperous regions.

Milestones Design a Policy Solution and identify technical solutions.


Part of the

https://dashboard.edmonton.ca/

https://dashboard.edmonton.ca/

https://www.ida.gov.sg/startups/programmes/Data-as-a-Service-Pilot



Goal 5: Increasing startups volume

Recommended action Pilot Projects Implementation focused on increasing startups volume Increasing startups volume can be achieved by enabling both internal and external approaches that must be executed in parallel. Embedding entrepreneurship at all levels of the education system is one key component that will get results in the long term. Nordic countries are implementing innovative solutions to generate more innovative startups by attracting foreign startups (eresidency program in Estonia) and by implementing open ip models, accessible, transparent and scalable concept to ignite and strengthen more research based innovation, to improve the traditional technology transfer models.

Impact Impact Level: High Accelerate the pace of generating more innovative startups

Milestones

At least, identify two candidates to implement pilot project to bring comparison and measurement.


Part of the

https://e-estonia.com/e-residents/about/



Appendix

Appendix 1.

Some references for Startup Manifestors EU Startup manifesto http://startupmanifesto.eu/ Belgian Startup Manifesto http://startupmanifesto.be/ Spanish Startup Manifesto http://www.spainstartupmanifesto.com/ Swedish Startup Manifesto http://en.startupmanifesto.se/ Greek Startup Manifesto http://startupmanifesto.gr/ Philly Startup Manifesto http://phillystartupleaders.org/manifesto/


Part of the

http://startupmanifesto.eu/

http://startupmanifesto.be/

http://www.spainstartupmanifesto.com/

http://en.startupmanifesto.se/

http://startupmanifesto.gr/

http://phillystartupleaders.org/manifesto/



Appendix 2.

Startup Commons Presentation at Startup Gathering event


Part of the



Appendix 3.

Moderator Briefing


Part of the



Appendix 4.

Attached raw data from the Breakout Session


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Startup Island 2020 ForumGetting the Fundamentals RightValto Loikkanen & Oscar Ramirez

Copyrights © Startup Commons 2015

Innovation Ecosystem

Startup Ecosystem

Research IPR

Innovation via Big Companies &

Public Sector.

Closed process & Internal resources

Innovation by

Startups

Research IPR

Innovation via Big

Companies & Public Sector.

Innovation by Startups

Open, collaborative &

external resourcesFundingSources

Service Providers

SupportOrganizations

FundingSources

New Funding Solutions

Customers

Customers

Ecosystem Value*: Amsterdam vs Silicon Valley* Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2015

Amsterdam$ 8.1 - 9.9 bn

Silicon Valley$ 264 - 323 bn

x 32

Minimum Viable Product

Validate / Iterate (or pivot)

IdeationEntrepreneurial ambition and/or potential scalable product or service idea for a big enough target market. Initial business idea on why and how it would create value. One person or a vague team; no confirmed commitment or no right balance of skills in the team structure yet.

ConceptingDefining mission and vision with initial strategy and key milestones defined for at least next 3 years on how to get there, -> 3, 6, 12, 24, 36 months. Two or three entrepreneurial core co-founders with complementary skills and balanced ownership plan. Maybe have extended team members for additional roles & ownership.

CommitmentCommitted and balanced co-founding team with shared vision and attitude. Able to develop the product or service (Minimum Viable Product) without dependency of uncommitted external resources, or already have initial product or service in place. Shareholder agreement signed between co-founders, including milestones, committed time and money use, for minimum 3 years with vesting terms.

ValidationIterating, validating assumptions until have validated solution to demonstrate initial user growth and/or revenue. Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) identified. Can start to attract additional investment based resources (money or sweat equity) for equity, revenue share or future revenue.

ScalingFocus on growth, showing KPI’s based measurable, growth in user, customer revenue growth and/or market traction in a big or fast growing target market. Can and want to grow fast. May, will or have attracted significant funding or would be able to do so if wanted. Hiring, improving in quality and implementing processes

EstablishingAchieved great growth, that can be expected to continue. Easily attracts financial and people resources. Depending on vision, mission and commitments, will continue to grow and often tries to culturally continue “like a startup". Founders and/or investors make exit(s) or continue with the company.

Lean Startup

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ or send a letter to

Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Version 2.5

www.startupcommons.org

Mission > Vision > Strategy Scale Up

Business Model / Market Fit

Co-founder team formation What, to whom? & Why and how? Grow / Expand

-2 -1 30 21

Product / Market FitVision / Founders FitProblem / Solution Fit

STARTUP DEVELOPMENT PHASES

The reality of creating a pipeline of future businesses for your city

Ideation Concepting Commitment Validation Scaling Establishing

6000 business ideas

4000 people≈250 teams 150 startup teams 55 potential

startups15 growing

startups4 significant companies

STARTUP DEVELOPMENT PHASES

Minimum Viable Product

Validate / Iterate (or pivot)

Lean StartupMission > Vision > Strategy Scale Up

Co-founder team formation What, to whom? & Why and how? Grow / Expand

-2 30 2

Shared mission and vision Committed skills balanced founding team “Can Do” Attitude Able to develop the product/service (without dependency of

uncommitted external resources) OR already have initial product/service developed Shareholder agreement with “right things” in it

-

Founding Team

Clear intellectual property rights Big addressable market AND/OR fast growing

international market AND/OR big market in disruption High demand (market pull) Scalable business model Good market timing

-

Business Potential

Six Key Pillars Focus on Phases -2 to 0

Environment Culture Skills Education Networks State Support

-2 -1 30 21

Business idea

Team

Private Advisory: Multiple advisors

In search of co-founders

SHA Workshop

Group Advisory

Private Advisory: One advisor

Pitch Training & feedback

General networking

In search of team members

Startup Info (stages & service matching)

Company registration, VAT etc. basics advisory

Co-working space and pop up advisory

Pitching events: for advisors, funding, sweat equity & visibility

Recruiting support & advisory

Biz Model Canvas

MVP & metrics workshop

Customer Development

Startup Commons Back-end infrastructure

Business

Com

pany

Random events, meetups & presentations in the ecosystem

Media as a Service

Marketing ServicesMarketing Workshop

Subsidised specialist grants (UX, design etc. etc.)

Sales as a Service

Subsidised specialist grants (accounting, legal etc.)

Startup Weekend etc.

Accelerator Bootcamps

Public sector as a customer

“At stake is nothing less than

the economic future of our

towns, cities and regions.”

Startup Commons Global + + www.startupcommons.org + +

@startupcommons + +

Oscar [email protected]

+34 656 180 880 (ESP)@oscar__ramirez

Valto [email protected]

+358 400 421 551 (FIN)@valto

Breakout Session Briefing DocumentStartup Island 2020 Forum

- Getting the Fundamentals Right

Breakout Session Topic

Creating a Startup Manifesto to support early stage

startups

To create the building blocks forbreakout group will consider:

1. What questions do we need toecosystems (environment, culture, skills, education, network, state

support)

2. To answer these questions who do we need to speak with

Document produced by Valto Loi

Breakout Session Briefing DocumentStartup Island 2020 Forum

Getting the Fundamentals Right

In association with



startups in your city

To create the building blocks for a Startup Manifesto for your city each breakout group will consider:

What questions do we need to ask under the 6 pillars of startup (environment, culture, skills, education, network, state

support) for early stage startups in our city

answer these questions who do we need to speak withcity?

alto Loikkanen and Óscar Ramírez Muñoz

0

Breakout Session Briefing Document

Getting the Fundamentals Right -



a Startup Manifesto for your city each

ask under the 6 pillars of startup (environment, culture, skills, education, network, state

in our city?

answer these questions who do we need to speak with in our

1

Summary

Moderator Outline – The moderator leads and encourages inputs and discussion from the group at each themed breakout board. Rapporteur Outline - The Rapporteur will collate the key findings of the discussion and relay them to the Startup Commons team to be shared with the attendees before the end of the Forum.

Here is a summary of what happens during the breakout session:

The objective is to:

A. Arrive at a series of questions (maximum 8) for each of the 6 themes that underpin startup ecosystems (Environment, Culture, Skills, Education, Network, State Support).

B. Identify who best (individuals, organisations, networks) in your city can help provide informed insights into those questions.

C. Use the above to create a survey or hold focus groups with the aim of creating a Startup Manifesto containing a constructive set of goals to create a supportive environment for early stage startups in your city by the end of November 2015.

How the breakout session will proceed:

1. Oscar Ramirez Munoz and Valto Loikkanen will give a short overview to attendees of how the breakout session will work during their talk.

2. Attendees will be allocated into groups, to encourage new insights the people in each group will be from diverse backgrounds. There will be highly visible boards for each of the 6 pillars of startup ecosystems a Moderator and Rapporteur will be allocated to each board.

3. The Moderator needs to seek to achieve the following two goals in the allotted:

Breakout Group Activity Time Allotted What are the questions we need to ask to identify where our city is currently in respect of early stage startups? Sample questions are provided in the detailed briefing below.

15 minutes

For each question who can help us answer these questions – specific individuals, organisations or networks.

15 minutes

2

4. At the end of the breakout session the participants return to the auditorium for the next section of the Forum. The Rapporteur then compiles the key questions, any interesting points that arose and the people, organisations or networks that can help give insights on the questions.

About the Startup Manifesto movement across Europe

“The solution doesn't come from one individual or group, all stakeholders in the startup ecosystem need to work together.”

Spain’s Startup Manifesto

The Startup Manifesto Movement is a grassroots up initiative that seeks to drive change throughout Europe to help support the starting and scaling of more businesses by building more effective ecosystems for startups in the European Union’s 28 member states. They seek to achieve this by working collaboratively with the key stakeholders in their cities and countries to create a document that represents their goals, a Startup Manifesto. To date at least a dozen countries have produced startup manifestos including:

Carmen Bermejo co-authored Spain's Startup Manifesto - http://www.spainstartupmanifesto.com/

Karen Boers co-authored the Belgian Startup Manifesto -

http://startupmanifesto.be/

Dimitris Drakoulis co-authored the Greek Startup Manifesto - http://startupmanifesto.gr/

Przemysław Grzywa and Eliza Kruczkowska co-authored the Polish Startup

Manifesto - http://startuppoland.org/en/

Nils-Erik Jansson co-authored the Swedish of the Sweden Startup Manifesto - http://en.startupmanifesto.se/

Guy Levin co-authored the United Kingdom Startup Manifesto -

http://www.coadec.com/the-startup-manifesto/

Bastiaan Zwanenburg co-authored the Netherlands Startup Manifesto - http://startupmanifesto.nl/

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Why the Startup Island 2020 Forum is a key part of the Startup Gathering

The Startup Gathering is about uniting communities in towns, cities and regions across the country behind their local startups. To help more people to start, scale and succeed from Ireland the Startup Gathering focuses in one week (October 5th - 10th) over 350 events nationally. These events, programmes and initiatives help create opportunities for startups to collaborate and develop new relationships with the key partners they need to accelerate their growth including enterprise agencies, investors, large corporates, the banking sector, service providers and many others.

The Startup Gathering seeks to create alignment between the key partners successful startups need and the arrows that make up the Startup Gathering logo capture this intention:

Yellow arrow - Great startups need the backing of a strong team of supporters and service providers such as accountants, lawyers, patent specialists, working space providers, connectivity and many others.

Purple arrow - Often startups are not aware of the services available to them. More startups need to engage with the wide range of services and supports available from Ireland’s enterprise support agencies.

Green arrow - Research Centres & Tech Transfer Offices - We need more startups with great scalable ideas that can compete on the international stage. Increasing the interaction with research, be it formally through the Tech Transfer Offices or informally with research centres is key to this.

Red arrow - Startups need early customer sales to help them grow and raise funding. The bigger the first sale the better (along with the credibility of dealing with a large company provides). This is where Ireland’s local and multinational corporates can help

Blue arrow - Represents investors, banks and VCs. Ambitious startups needs lots of financial backing particularly when they are scaling and can need funding in the region of €5-€10 million.

The Startup Island 2020 Forum is about bringing key representatives from the stakeholders listed above together to see how they can create a shared vision for strengthening each city’s startup ecosystem through new partnerships, collaborations and plans of action (specifically a Startup Manifesto).

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Background Information

Why startups are important

Two‐thirds of all new jobs come from startups and vibrant startup communities are increasingly key to foreign direct investment decisions by multinationals who see startups as a source of acquisition hires (or ‘acqui-hires’) and innovation partnerships. Minister Bruton launched Ireland’s first ever Entrepreneurship Strategy last October. His vision for Ireland is one that: the country “will become recognised as a place where good ideas can be transformed into excellent businesses, new jobs will be created as international investors and entrepreneurs seek Ireland out as a location of choice.” While the Chairman of the Startup Gathering Steering Group, Minister Ged Nash, has highlighted the fact that Ireland needs a significant increase in the number of people choosing entrepreneurship as a career choice. Equally our Taoiseach is committed to Ireland becoming "the best small country in the world in which to do business." This vision for our country to become a Startup Island involves creating a new industry for Ireland, the startup industry. And we are ideally suited for this as a country, we are welcoming, sharing, a nation of problem solvers and networkers. The ideal conditions to become a global startup hub but this goal needs the startup sectors in all our cities growing and strengthening rapidly over the coming years. The breakout session is a starting point in this process, to provide a starting point for each city to use the mechanism of a Startup Manifesto to accelerate the development of each city’s plan to strengthen its startup ecosystem. The Urgency While high growth startups that scale rapidly are increasingly defining the way advanced economies grow and compete a major international ranking of startup ecosystems was released this summer. No Irish city made it into the top 20 but Austin (Texas, population 843,000) and 5 European capitals did (including Amsterdam for the first time). Equally no Irish cities have featured in a number of recent ‘Top 5 places in Europe to start’ articles but Paris, Budapest and Estonia did. To change this we need a step change in the pipeline of entrepreneurial talent for the world class hubs that need to emerge in each of our city regions to successfully accelerate their growth. Startup guru Brad Feld would say we need a Startup Revolution, a step change and transformation in our startup sector to become a global startup hub!

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Goals of the Breakout Session

2015’s Focus is on Getting the Fundamentals right by examining how well supported early stage startups are in your city

Startup hubs are essentially ecosystems of key players necessary to the growth of startups, the objective of the process begun by the Startup Island 2020 Forum is to:

1. Build a collaborative mind-set and effort amongst stakeholders within the startup ecosystem.

2. Start the process of building a shared vision based on a mutual understanding of the current level of the city’s startup ecosystem and services leading to the creation of Startup Manifesto for your city’s early stage startups.

One way to view Startup Ecosystems are to envision them like factories, helping to produce successful innovative startups. As like any factory, also the ecosystem can be designed to focus on producing startups with target volume, quality and type. This should guide the work on how ecosystem is to be designed, developed and measured. With this framework in mind, as the Startup Gathering 2015 is about getting the fundamentals right at this point we want to focus on the beginning part of the ecosystem from what Startup Commons terms the startup development phases -2 to 0 range. The focus is on how to improve the quality and volume of early stage startup businesses in your city. Overview of the Startup Commons Model for Startup Phases

http://www.startupcommons.org/startup-development-phases.html

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Why the focus on early stage startups in the Startup Gathering 2015?

The theme of the Startup Gathering 2015 is about getting the fundamentals in place to build towards the goal of becoming a global startup hub by 2020, if we get more people in our cities starting with great business opportunities then there is the potential to have more startups scaling and succeeding from Ireland. The pipeline of successful established business starts with having a large quantity of good quality startups, please see the typical numbers needed below.

Therefore 2015’s focus is on phases -2 to 0 in the above model.

The ‘ideal’ stage startups in the Startup Commons

Model

1. Founding team is:

- Entrepreneurial core founding team of 2-3 - Balanced ownership - Balanced and complementary skills (design, build, sell) - Shared mission and vision - “can do” attitude - Confirmed with signed shareholder agreement.

It is important to assemble committed quality teams from the very beginning, before moving further, as this comes much harder later on. At the same time it removes a lot of future risk of poor team setups that are very difficult to fix at later phases of the development. 2. Team are pursuing a high potential business opportunity for:

- Clear intellectual property rights - Big addressable market AND/OR fast growing international market AND/OR

big market in disruption - High demand (market pull) - Scalable business model

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- Good market timing

BREAKOUT SESSION STRUTURE AND BRIEF

Startup Commons and Startup Gathering have agreed the following six key pillars affect startup ecosystemr performance. The stage of development of a startup ecosystem will be shaped be different elements of maturity of each of the 6 key pillars above. For the purposes of this breakout session we are focussing on early stage startups and what level the 6 pillars in your city are at in terms of creating the Startup Commons ‘ideal’ startup. Below is a brief for the Moderator and Rapporteur containing an overview of the Pillar and sample questions to open the discussion.

ENVIRONMENT and Early stage startups

BRIEF FOR THOSE LEADING THE ENVIRONMENT BREAKOUT GROUP

For the purposes of this breakout session within Environment we mean the physical (office space, services) and intangible elements such as funding (sufficient funding for early stage startups).

Early stage startups need access to funding, quality research, basic and affordable office space, utilities, telecommunications, and transport infrastructure, among others. Universities, cities, large companies, NGO’s and private organization are typically providing these to early business venture via co-working spaces, incubator and accelerator models in various business or support arrangements. In parallel, it’s essential that you are either close to your target market (domestic) or have access to it (foreign). Also, this market needs to be large enough to sustain the startup’s business prospects. It is also highly beneficial to have and attract the R&D operations of large multinational organizations, business development or regional HQ type of activities present in the region.

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Additionally, the city should have standards of living that encourage people to spend a long period of time while you are launching your idea and beyond. In many cases it’s recognized that in long term and more permanent establishment of companies the motivations are often driven beyond business reasons by founders or main owners to choose to stay or relocate to specific city, that there is a good match with their and their families lifestyle and values. The more attractive the city is, the more people will come, the more interactions will be created. And the more various ties there are with business and people in the region, the more likely they will stay.

Access to capital is also one of the topics that resonates the most. Networks of business angels, venture capital funds and other early and later-stage investors are structurally lacking in many less mature startup ecosystems. Yet local equity investments are one key factor to help create more ties between startup and the local ecosystem. At the same time, Alternative Finance, including crowdfunding, peer to peer lending, equity crowdfunding is opening new international opportunities for new regions. By applying digital marketplaces in different countries and cities, one can productively showcase the best regional investment opportunities in the international market, channelling opportunities to different audiences beyond the single marketplace itself. Overall, alternative finance simplifies things and makes the process more transparent and founders can gain more knowledge about others having used the process before them. The digital fundraising process also forces to learn how to communicate with investors early on and more options is a positive thing for everyone. This alone is valuable for the future. The digital finance market is all about better access, transparency and efficiency. This, together with the data that this it generates, leads to accelerated learning and further development of all areas it spreads to.

SAMPLE QUESTIONS

1. How many early stage sources of funding are there in our city? Is it

enough? 2. How can early stage startups interface with research, are they

sufficiently aware of the resources available? 3. Do we have enough suitable office and co-working space in our city

locations which can create a density for startups to collaborate and motivate each other?

STATE SUPPORTS and Early stage startups

BRIEF FOR THOSE LEADING THE STATE SUPPORTS BREAKOUT GROUP

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For the purposes of this breakout session within State Agencies we specifically mean state backed enterprise supports such as programmes etc. Many governments in developed nations encourage entrepreneurship and startup activity to spur job creation and economic growth, although policy makers at the regional and municipal levels may be closer to sources of innovation. Supportive government policies through the availability of relevant support and training programmes are critical in enabling startup ecosystems and clusters to globally connect and to scale.

Government supported initiatives should focus on many indirect ways to improve core knowledge and understanding about startups, entrepreneurship, innovation and local ecosystem services and developments in form of sponsoring events, training and advisory services and by investing to implement and operate physical and e-infrastructure solutions that help in visualizing, navigating and operating within local, national and global startup ecosystems and in connecting various offline and online world activities. SAMPLE QUESTIONS

1. What programmes are available to encourage ideation? Are they

sufficient for the size of our city?

2. What programmes are available to encourage starting up in an efficient way? Are they sufficient for the size of our city?

3. What incubation and accelerator programmes are available to startups? Are they sufficient for the size of our city?

EDUCATION and Early stage startups

BRIEF FOR THOSE LEADING THE EDUCATION BREAKOUT GROUP

For the purposes of this breakout session within Education we mean entrepreneurial training and multidisciplinary teaching. Here we are talking in terms of adjusting part of the education focus by implementing entrepreneurial programs to foster innovation, entrepreneurship, creativity and problem solving mindset, businesses creation and sales for various education tracks. It’s highly recommended that education systems around the world adapt much more

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quickly to the needs of the market, to not only educate for skilled workforce, but also as job creators - the entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurial education is different from traditional business education. Where as business education typically focus on knowing how to setup and run a business and typically only from specific part of the business function, entrepreneurship is about identifying new business opportunities for business or needs for change and with initial success continuing with that opportunity for maximum impact, while navigating the challenges along the way, pushing forward regardless to resources currently available, in most times starting from potential innovation and creating new innovations along the way. While entrepreneurship and innovation are key individual things to learn and understand as startup founder, startups are not about individuals and solo acts or performance, but about co-founding entrepreneurial teams with various skills but shared vision and their collective team commitment and performance to grow into significant organization.

Learning entrepreneurship, innovation and related skills are not important only for students, but also to teachers, professors, researchers and education organizations board and management to be able to better understand the relevance, importance to be able to support and develop and measure entrepreneurship programs and studies.

SAMPLE QUESTIONS

1. How may ‘learning by doing’ entrepreneurial opportunities (like Startup

Weekend) do we provide to our students as they progress through the education system? Is it enough?

2. Do we teach in a multi-disciplinary approach to enable the next generation of startup teams to be able to develop the product or service without excessive dependency on uncommitted external resources.

3. Are we training the next generation of entrepreneurs with the tools such as the Business Model Canvas to help them focus on startup opportunities that seek big addressable market AND/OR fast growing international market AND/OR big market disruptions.

4. Does our education system create resilience and adaptability, key skills needed for entrepreneurship.

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NETWORKS and Early stage startups

BRIEF FOR THOSE LEADING THE NETWORKS BREAKOUT GROUP For the purposes of this breakout session within Networks we refer to established networks that startups can connect in to (Chambers of Commerce etc), informal networks (evening networking opportunities such as Pint of Science) and startup community networks (Startup Weekend, Startup Beta, peer to peer mentoring). As for the business local and international networks, it is an essential success factor for most of startups that they have access to researchers, specialists, businessmen, other entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial talent, large established companies and investors with whom they can network and to form founding teams and establish various types of working relationship. Facilitated and target oriented matching events, mentoring and networking programs are a very important and popular aspect on making these relationships happen that can be made more effective and measurable with connected online matching solutions.

In all stages of startup formation, it is important to have information and advice delivered via events or mentors –particularly those who have successfully navigated through the specific development phase and moving towards the next one. There is often a demonstrated need for assistance in connecting entrepreneurs with resources and expertise from within the local ecosystem and beyond. Networks ensure access to knowledge, capital, infrastructure and talent. While it’s quite natural and easy to facilitate and improve networking between people, the ecosystem level challenge to overcome, is to find ways to break the silos between organizations, to connect organization processes, customers and communities in a natural way that is in line with startup development phases for maximum network benefits. And as such, networks and networking is implemented into core of the startup ecosystem structure. Networks by nature bring collaboration and a collaborative culture drives the beneficial effects of networking but it can’t exist without geographic clustering, which creates natural momentum for members of the startup community to interact with each other by sharing ideas, mentoring and partnering. Visibility and Accessibility are key factors to make this happen.

SAMPLE QUESTIONS

1. Does our city have sufficient formal/informal networking opportunities to help create new collaborations between large corporates, research institutes and investors with our city’s entrepreneurs and startups? 2. Startups embedded in an environment of regular, relevant events and networking opportunities on average have a high success rate. Do we have

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sufficient startup specific events happening in our city? Where are they visible? 2. Are there sufficient service providers in local networks that enable startups to access cost effective services such as shareholder agreement available in our city?

CULTURE and Early stage startups

BRIEF FOR THOSE LEADING THE CULTURE BREAKOUT GROUP

For the purposes of this breakout session within Culture we mean mindset, entrepreneurial drive/ambition and cultural support for entrepreneurship as a career choice. Internationally it has been demonstrated that young people are the most willing to embrace entrepreneurship and risk, but at the same bigger successful ventures are more often happening with entrepreneurs aged above forty. Factors leading to this, tends to be the combination of entrepreneurial people starting young and having experienced enough learnings and having built personal networks, maturity and long term thinking along the way. If a culture is risk averse then entrepreneurship will not be seen as a viable career option. This can be addressed by highlighting entrepreneurs as role models, and accepting failure as a part of the learning process. Combined with average time from founding to international success taking several years to achieve. There is no specific age to focus, but find a natural balance in individual founding team structures and ecosystem level focus considering the local environment and other factors.

SAMPLE QUESTIONS

1. Fear of failure deters people from starting up. Do we actively create and support entrepreneurial ambition and calculated risk taking? How?

2. The scale of the business opportunity startups pursue in the leading

startup hubs is typically opportunities of an international scale, does our culture encourage this level of ambition? How can we address this?

3. Does our culture support instil the long term view in our entrepreneurs?

4. Do we highlight entrepreneurs as role models and have a cultural

acceptance that failure is a part of the learning process.

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SKILLS and Early stage startups

BRIEF FOR THOSE LEADING THE SKILLS BREAKOUT GROUP For the purposes of this breakout session within Skills we mean access to talent and human capital.

An educated and innovative workforce lends itself to further growth, and increased willingness to start new ventures with capability and seek growth (Ács, et al., 2015). Teaching and practising lifelong learning, entrepreneurial and digital technology skills at all levels of education is critical to growing a robust startup ecosystem as it allows startups to have high-quality workers, skills and competencies. Universities are one of the prime sources of these, for example. Beyond skills, you need the right culture and mindset that contribute for growing momentum of entrepreneurial “can do” attitude among all people within your ecosystem. Often times a common solution applied to ignite this spirit among new relevant key people, is to organize a visit to Silicon Valley with an intensive one week program to meet key people, organizations, entrepreneurs and to participate local workshops, events and then bring that mindset back to local ecosystem and own activities.

SAMPLE QUESTIONS

1. Are startups in our city competing for talent with the large corporates? How can we help startups attract and retain the talent they need to grow their businesses? 2. Do we know what the key skills shortages are that startups in our city are experiencing? 3. Can we help startups access the skills they need in our city by creating opportunities for our third level institutions to place interns with them?

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ABOUT STARTUP COMMONS

Startup Commons Global is part of Grow VC Group http://group.growvc.com/ and began as a personal project of Valto Loikkanen, Co-Founder & Chairman of Startup Commons, and Co-Founder & CEO at Grow VC Group, for "scaling entrepreneurship" globally. Our work is based on 20 years global entrepreneurship experience with entrepreneurship and startup advisory work via Government and non-profit NGO for 10 years.

Startup Commons was first created as Grow VC Networks in 2011, where diverse entrepreneurship communities within startup ecosystem needed a way to be connected to each other online in order to grow beyond the boundaries of a single organization, city, state, region, country or even continent. Via hundreds of pilots, we gathered valuable information and data on continents like Africa, America, Asia or Europe on different levels, and eventually, we officially launched Startup Commons Global in 2014 to provide a startup ecosystem development concept to help any city, region or country to map out, visualize, measure, maintain and further develop a healthy and vibrant startup ecosystem.

Among various pilots, City of Helsinki have been a leading living lab ecosystem where our startup ecosystem development concept is being continuously developed further in close cooperation with key partner organizations. We are actively developing and running multiple online tools and services with open and closed online communities in connection to their own entrepreneurial and startup services, including accelerator programs, incubators, university programs, student networks, startup events, etc.

Key projects we worked on include those for the Singapore Government, World Bank, European Commission, Estonian Government and Vietnam Government. As a result of all these experiences, we have extensive experience talking in the areas of entrepreneurship, startups and open innovation.

While we have our own team members on the ground we also work extensively with partnership models from large multinational consulting companies and solution providers to smaller boutique expert houses for local support, project management etc. so that we can focus purely on providing value in our areas of expertise. Some of our global partners that are working with us to develop the Startup Commons technological infrastructure include Crowd Valley, Grow Advisors, Luxus, Just Coded and Sunrise Software Solutions.

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Further Resources and Reports by Startup Commons Startup Development Phases Model - http://www.startupcommons.org/startup-development-phases.html Startup Commons Startup Ecosystem Whitepaper - http://www.startupcommons.org/download-startup-ecosystem-documentation.html

Startup Gathering 2015 National SG Forum Report by Startup Commons

Government & Nonprofit

Transcript of Startup Gathering 2015 National SG Forum Report by Startup Commons