EU matters for start-ups!

The EU might sound boring, dusty and bureaucratic! Or NOT: If you want to make a scalable solution in the market and to solve a social problem.

Last Thursday I was invited to give a talk on my experiences with EU funding, and the standpoints towards the EU research and innovation programme FP9. 
We were three persons in the panel: The Danish minister for Research and Education, Head of Research and Innovation from the Danish Technological University, and me, from small ReMoni…

Not the sexiest theme you might think. But if you are willing to learn, it can be very helpful to get things done in real life.

To succeed as a start-up, building a scalable solution to solve a social challenge, you need to master de-risking. Minimizing the risk of funding, the risk of market access, the risk of knowledge, risk of copy-cats, risk, risk, risk...

Here the EU stops at being boring:

1. The SME instrument can help to de-risk the critical development, both financial and market wise – if you can stand up in the hard competition to win a grant
2. EU has turned us from a small national home-market to a 500 million people EU home-market – with aligned regulation.
3. Both knowledge and partners are much easier to work with across Europe, and the EU even help to arrange events and support for collaboration.
4. When the common EU patent gets in place, the cost of protecting your novel inventions will drop significantly.

Not that bad – at all!