Europe’s Scaleup Geography and the Role of Access to Talent

Although the concept of the ecosystem for entrepreneurs and startups dominates the discourse on promoting innovation, the geographical pattern of cities with startups remains largely uncharted territory. This study’s author first gives an overview of this concept’s roots in regional sciences and then outlines the contours of Europe’s scaleup geography by analyzing data on 12,500 scaleups (startups that raised more than 1 million euros) at the municipal level. Performance is marked by a strong West-East and North-South divide, and most scaleups and funding concentrate in a handful of cities. One may assume some convergence, however, from the upstream of locally available talent, especially in university towns. The study’s author concludes that scaleup ecosystems in Europe have only developed into a self-reinforcing system in a few cities. Although they have become self-sustaining in a multitude of Western and Northern European cities, large cities in Southern Europe and Central and Eastern Europe lag behind, not least because of the weak upstream of university talent.