PORTFOLIO
Our Portfolio projects are a key part of SCALE.CITIES activities. This overview gives insights into our startup city projects and initiatives and explains why your city should get involved.
SCALE Assessment Tool
An instrument made by and for cities - do you join to enhance this tool with us?!
Self-assessment tool to benchmark your city and receive suggested best practices. How do you stand as an ecosystem? What are your strengths and weaknesses? Where and how can you as a government play a role? How can you learn from other cities? These questions are central to the self-assessment tool, which is explicitly not a ranking of cities but a tool to strengthen the local ecosystem. Assess and grow your local startup & tech ecosystem. Instead of using rankings, or comparisons, you assess your ecosystems’ current status and start designing an action program to strengthen it. SCALE Tool matches effectively the world’s Best Practices with your local ecosystem and put it into an action program.
It is a unique opportunity to see where your city is at, a chance to reflect, to improve and to translate your newest learnings into concrete action.
The ultimately goal is to work towards an action program — based on your city’s roots & dynamics — inspired by practices seen around the world.
SCALE Assessment TOOL is an instrument that helps to:
– Provide an Overview
– Align & commit stakeholders
– To Set Goals
– Design an action program
SCALE Assessment Tool helps city representatives, public officials and/or ecosystem builders in the process of creating a collaboration and overarching ‘StartupCity’ program. Usually it takes a few weeks (up to 2 months) to self-assess the status quo and align stakeholders around ambition, goals and actions/initiatives.
Using the tool benefits your city in terms of speed, quality and costs. Time-efficiency can be obtained because of the prefab tools, playbooks and datasources. The instruments has been used by other cities and all the best practices have been validated. Implementing the Tool is cost-efficient because it is made by and for cities. Cities invest in their initiatives and projects and open the learnings and playbooks for other cities.
SCALE Assessment TOOL is free to use by SCALE.CITIES members.
The SCALE Assessment Tool is part of a assessment and design process. SCALE.CITIES szees 4 steps:
Step 1. Survey — Answer 75 questions, covering the five most important domains of your ecosystem: TALENT, CAPITAL, CONTENT, CLIENTS, ENVIRONMENT. Obtain data about your local ecosystem via our data partners.
Step 2. Consolidate the status quo, of your ecosystem in each domain — Your answers are associated with a score to help you reflect on your ecosystems’ current situation. Rank your scores and learning points.
Step 3. Ambition setting — decide on ambition and the role of government per domain. Formulate objectives and key success indicators.
Step 4. Decide which best practices and initiates should be implemented in your ecosystem (first). Matching ambition with concreet actions.
The process contains of desk-research and 3 workshops — 1. Survey workshop (survey questionnaire), 2. Strategy workshop (consolidate status quo, formulate strategy & goals), 3. Alignment workshop (finetuning action program with stakeholders.
SCALE.CITIES Handbook
Best practices for strengthening your startup ecosystem
The Handbook is produced by StartupAmsterdam and StartupEurope. The main contributors are city officials and partners from twelve of the SCALE.CITIES partners who run the featured projects themselves and share their own insights, challenges encountered, and solutions that proved to be successful.
The content of the handbook has one major objective: to inspire public officials who hope to stimulate entrepreneurship in their local region/city and provide them with step-by-step guidance. Topics range from providing funding and launching events, to city incubator programmes and enabling policy change.
“There is a lot to learn from each other. The end goal is to help startups grow fast, scale globally, and make sure that our cities provide them with a strong ecosystem.” Santtu von Bruun, the city of Helsinki.
Each of the twelve cities in this handbook presents a local programme, project or initiative. All are in different phases or of varying calibres, with different goals and resources available, but they have one thing in common: the local governments play an important role.
SHORT CONTENT OVERVIEW
Amsterdam features an article about the launch and management of a city incubator programme and mapping of its startup scene;
Antwerp‘s chapter is about activities to promote entrepreneurship among students;
Barcelona describes their initiative to promote the CleanTech sector;
Berlin tells us the story of their regional incubator programme for tech-related startups;
Helsinki offers insights into providing event services for startups and entrepreneurs;
Lisbon writes about their innovation hub and city rehabilitation;
Madrid showcases their initiatives to promote female entrepreneurship;
Milan features their incubator for social impact startups and elaborates on the importance of talent support;
Munich’s chapter describes how the city runs a startup info platform;
Porto‘s part is about funding and promoting events and actions for the startup and tech community;
Rome’s chapter is all about more traditional policy making and regulations necessary for a growing startup ecosystem;
Finally, the city of Vienna contributes a piece about running an open house startup city event.
So, take a look and get inspired!
SCALE Best Practices Database
SCALE.CITIES is building a database with StartupCity best practices.
Cities from around the world are strenghtening their startup & tech ecosystem with iniatives and projects. We are collecting these best practices from various cities from all over the world in our extensive database. Purpose is to share it with our members for knowledge exchange: sharing strategies, tools, playbooks and legislation guidelines. A start has already been made by the 20 SCALE cities, and this will be further expanded in the coming period. The database contains per best practice a summary, organisational structure, business model and contact person for each project. Join this project by sharing your cities case! Together we grow our local and global startup ecosystems.
SCALE.CITIES Network
Push the growth SCALE.CITIES Network into a true global network
The focus of SCALE.CITIES is on the role of the government in activities and initiatives that strengthen the startup entrepreneurial space and tech ecosystem. Participants are representing their city work in departments, which are continuously engaged in setting up and executing projects and programs aimed at improving the startup ecosystem. The goal is to have SCALE Chapters on each continent. Europe has started his chapter already (with 20 cities).
Annual StartupCity Summit
Building the best and biggest StartupCity Summit, together
StartupCity Summit: a place to share insights and discuss the current and future role of local governments in creating flourishing tech ecosystems. The event is restricted to a specific circle of people with the following profiles: (Deputy) Mayors, City Officials Regional Economic Development, Civil servants responsible for Startup or Scale up policies, talent attraction or digital innovation, CEOs of StartupCity Programs, Smart City Officers, Directors Local Investment Agencies, Leadership of Leading Incubators, Accelerators or Science parks. Around 300 city officials and local ecosystem builders from 150 different cities join us to share best practices. Through roundtable sessions and peer-to-peer learning, they develop strategies that strengthen their city’s ecosystem. Join this project and help the team grow the Summit year by year, both in Quality and in the quantity of participating cities!
StartupCity Book
A manual for StartupCity officials
SCALE.CITIES works hard on developing, improving, and spreading the comprehensive guidebook, which explains how local governments can improve their own startup cities. This is a must-read for civil servants wishing to understand the startup mindset and process. Enhance the book together with us and make sure the learnings and insights from your ecosystem are in the next edition of the book.
StartupCity was designed to provide administrations, civil servants and public-private initiatives with guidance on how they can think and work like a startup. The book takes a holistic look at how the public sector can engage with the private sector to form initiatives. This – in turn – will boost the startup world’s ecosystem and nurture cities as breeding grounds for innovation and job growth. Bas Beekman and Ruben Nieuwenhuis – the public and private leads of the StartupAmsterdam action programme – guide the reader through concrete lessons, cases and best practices, showing how every city in the world can grow into a startup city.
A warm welcome from international counterparts!
StartupAmsterdam is more than happy to share insights and set an example for other progressive cities that wish to become more startup oriented.
West Ukraine’s largest city, Lviv, became the first city to express interest and utilise the StartupCity book. The translation of the book was a collaboration between local accelerator Greencubator (Ukranian link) and the Western NIS Enterprise Fund. Furthermore, the book was taken on a regional tour that included the following cities: Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Kharkiv, Odessa and Dnipro. Additional workshops were held in Kyiv in February 2017.
In 2018, the Italian version of the book was presented during Rome Startup Week.
SCALE.CITIES is looking forward to working with more cities in the future, facilitating the knowledge and expertise exchange that will help us all grow as global startup cities.
International Bootcamps
Intensive emersion into a local ecosystem trips for startups
SCALE.CITIES develops partnerships with local startup organisations cities to organise International Startup Bootcamps that enable the exchange of knowledge and opportunities. During these intensive multiple-day bootcamps, international startups are acquainted by the city representatives with the expertise and networks they require in order to enter the local market.
The bootcamps are designed to help young growing companies gain valuable information from experts, lead users and peers on a soft landing – assisting the startups to learn how to expand and scale their companies internationally.
A bootcamp typically includes:
– workshops on soft landing in that particular city (including advice on legal/ recruitment/ financial practices);
– networking opportunities and one-on-one meetings with local launching customers and organisations;
– business development and Marketing/PR sessions;
– pinning down cultural differences;
– (investor) pitching opportunities;
– visiting a selection of innovation/startup hubs, incubators and accelerators.
The unique advantage of these bootcamps lies in the expertise and networks of local governments’ representatives, who carefully work on the tailor-made programs and content for each exchange group.
