The aim of the innovation action STARTUP SCALEUP is to build a European ecosystem around four consolidated entrepreneurial ecosystems in Spain (Cloud Incubator HUB), the Netherlands (Crosspring Lab), Lithuania (Open Coffee Club) and Ireland (The Ryan Academy) and the largest social network for startups in the European Union (F6S), in order to provide a greater range and quality of services to ambitious entrepreneurs who want to launch and grow companies focused on the Internet of Things and Services (IoTS). These four ecosystems, who have a track record and complementary strengths, will be able to support startups by enhancing the basic business skills of the entrepreneurs to strengthen the business sense of their startups,testing the soundness of technological concept and its uniqueness in the market, providing early exposure to EU market access, enabling talent matching and providing Venture Capital groups and other financiers with access to a critical mass of startups. To achieve this aim under the call topic (ICT-13-2014, web entrepreneurship), the STARTUP SCALEUP will: • Analyse which of their current services are best-in-class, assess which of these can be offered on a non-local scale and then design and implement a new service model to their entrepreneurs. • Set up an online platform for mentoring, networking and training through which the ecosystem members can share knowledge, experience, and contacts to support the startups, transcending geographical, cultural and resouce-related barriers. • Generate awareness and interest in STARTUP SCALEUP by developing a specific communication strategy that enables us to to attract the most talented startups to the ecosystem, pull in resources and publicize the activities of the ecosystem • Run two sequential acceleration programmes in order to create IoTS-based companies and the validate and readjust the STARTUP SCALEUP ecosystem and services. • Set up a dissemination plan to maximize the expected project impact.

The ePlus ecosystem project will develop and deploy an online and onsite environment, building on and interconnecting existing ecosystems, hubs and initiatives, in order to setup a runway for web entrepreneurs to start and scaleup a business in Europe and grow internationally. This European ecosystem will help web-entrepreneurs to develop and scale up their ideas and businesses, from a business international validation phase, to internationalization, access to finance and to business growth, thus complementing the service offer currently made available at local ecosystems level. The ePlus project will meet the objectives stated in the workprogramme in terms of accelerating web entrepreneurship in Europe, and offer a unique new platform that answers to the need for new services expressed in the Startup Manifesto. It will provide the nurturing to help web-entrepreneurs go global, through a unique combination of talents, tools and services of an European scale in all key elements required to create great companies: team, concept, technology, and capital. This will be done through the following elements: - Putting in motion a true pan-european web-entrepreneurship ecosystem by setting up the initial backbone made of the interconnection between the booming regional ecosystems of Lisbon, Nice and Baden-Württemberg, combining and intertwining current services and opportunities and making room for more local ecosystems to join in; - Untap on Europe’s unique mass of + 50,000 skilled and mobile researchers generated by institutions such as the Marie Curie Actions in order to reinforce the web-entrepreneurs teams’ skills and technology grasp; - Guide web-entrepreneurs into global business concepts through a European mentoring scheme, building on the best regional and national programmes available; - Facilitate access to some of the best services from the best service providers in Europe to promote web-entrepreneurs growth; - Ensure access to capital either in early stage or crowdfunding form.

TWIST project aims at connecting four existing local web entrepreneurship startup ecosystems and hubs, providing new services for web entrepreneurs aiming at scaling up and competing in the global market. TWIST consortium includes partners from four cities and regions with complementary profiles and assets: Warsaw, Lille, Rome, and Stockholm .The involved organizations are characterized by a similar typology of skills and expertise and can be classified into two main groups: accelerators, i.e. young, promising and already successful accelerators wishing to enlarge their collaborations and financial investors and/or services providers, acting as direct investors leveraging with private seed funds and/or, at the same time, providing highly qualified services for startups looking for equity funds or scaling up. TWIST key objectives are: support the creation of competitive startups in web and mobile sector, exchanging methodologies and competencies among the four ecosystems stakeholders, promote activities to cut the high failure rate of startups, favour cross-fertilization and funding opportunities. To reach its goals TWIST will provide: mentoring and coaching services for better understanding business models, financial technicalities for accessing finance for growth; a customized online platform to facilitate the meetups of web entrepeneurs with vertical,technical and legal experts, serial entrepreneurs and big industries; the creation of co-working laboratories and the organization of challenges for startups with the involvement of big players; pitching events with investors during the main international events . In line with Startup Europe Partnership (SEP) and with the specific call priorities, TWIST platform will focus on web entrepreneurs and will support them with services aiming at: valorizing the talents, favouring a better access to capital, developing the concept of co-living and co-working and link the startups ecosystems across EU.

WELCOME aims to connect 4 different major EU ecosystems (Berlin, Dublin, Milan and Madrid), identifying and engaging through WELCOME local partners the most relevant players of the previous 4 web entrepreneur (WE) ecosystems (investors, corporates, media, successful WEs) with prospective, emerging and successful startups. The final goal is to create a Pan-European ecosystem in which every WE in one of the ecosystems feels that belongs to it. WELCOME will run twice over a period of 2 years. There are 5 targets for WELCOME activities in the 4 ecosystems: • WP2. “Prospective wannabe entrepreneurs”, the goal is to impact on younger generations, woman and unemployed population and attract them to become active players in the ecosystems. • WP3. “Seed and early stage startups and investors”, the goal is to identify the emerging startups, investors (BAs, VCs), large & media corporates, media and in each local ecosystem and create connections and relationship cross-borders. The objective is not only to connect startups and investors, but also startups with other startups and build a cross-border investor network, supporting them to successfully launch their operations. • WP4. “Later stage startups and investors”, the objective is to identify the emerging stars in each local ecosystem and connect them with investors, corporates, and media in order to support them scale internationally within EU. • WP5: WELCOME will foster self-sustainability of their activities beyond the life of the project as well as collaboration with SE Initiative and other EU initiatives. • WP6: WELCOME will launch a media and a marketing campaign where the most interesting cases of EU Startups able to scale up will be presented to the public, by means of storytellings in relevant media Channels. The marketing campaign will be conducted by means of the WELCOME camper that will travel around the 4 ecosystems (displaying WELCOME logo).