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From start-up to scale-up: fueling growth firms in Europe

While there has been an increased policy focus on start-ups, few of these firms are able to survive and grow longer term. It is the high-growth busine

Date and time: 29 September 2015 14:30-16:30

Speakers

Sherry Coutu

Entrepreneur, Investor and Non-Executive Director,

Thomas Hellmann

Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Saïd School of Business, Oxford University,

This event started with a presentation from Sherry Coutu, the principal author of a recent UK report The Scale Up Report on UK Economic Growth. In the report, a ‘scale-up’ is defined as an enterprise with more than 10 employees at the beginning of the observation period which achieves average annualised growth in employees or turnover greater than 20 per cent per annum over a three year period. The report makes a number of recommendations for enabling UK scale up growth.

Her talk was followed by a presentation from Dr Thomas Hellmann of a framework developed to analyse the challenges facing firms from start-up through scale-up. He will also discuss the initial findings from a recent Entrepreneurship Policy Roundtable on financing growth at Said Business School in Oxford (in partnership with Bruegel and QCC).

The objective of this event was to have a dialogue between policy makers, practitioners and academics about the challenges posed by the so-called ‘scale-up’ problem - with a particular focus on financing challenges. This included taking a critical look at current financing barriers for scaling companies, and the possible ways in which public policy may help to address this issue.