A pan-European Networked Acceleration Programme to expand acceleration ecosystems and foster the scalability potential of European business

The European innovation landscape is still geographically unbalanced, negatively affecting more disadvantaged business ecosystems and creating in those areas weaker entrepreneurial activity, scarcer investments and lower employment opportunities.

As a consequence, the diverse innovation landscape in Europe and the strong geographical gap among the better-connected innovation ecosystems (‘strong innovators’ and ‘innovation leaders’) and the less connected ones (‘moderate’ and ‘emerging’), leads the start-ups from better-connected ecosystems benefitting from more local accelerators with greater funding opportunities and more qualified business support services compared to their counterparts elsewhere.

Starting from these premises, the mission of the AccelerAction project is to lay the foundations for a reversal trend, by contributing in making moderate and emerging innovation ecosystems more attractive to international companies interested in setting up their businesses outside the established centres and generating a more balanced business activity across Europe.

To this end, AccelerAction aims to create more connected and efficient innovation ecosystems in the sector of advanced technologies, supporting the scaling of companies, encouraging innovation and stimulating cooperation among national, regional and local innovation actors through a pan-European Networked Acceleration Programme.

These are the AccelerAction objectives in detail: i) improve the quality and outreach of business acceleration services in developing innovation ecosystems; ii) co-design programmes of activities proposed jointly by business acceleration entities located in less connected ecosystems and innovation hubs; iii) strengthening less connected ecosystems to increase their competitiveness & connectivity, and to keep more balanced the business activity across Europe; iv) accelerate gender equality in the innovation ecosystems.