European startups fail to scale, which often is the reason why they also fail in general. To avoid this, Startup ecosystems have to be connected and support the flow of startups from one ecosystem to another. Like nature‘s ecosystems, startups follow the path of least resistance or rather of the biggest opportunities, flowing like rivers downstream, from smaller ecosystems to the larger ones. Following such logic, this Project will connect smaller startup ecosystems to the larger ones through building awareness and capcaity for scaling and providing Soft-landing support. Soft-Landing Project will: (1) organize 40 1-week Startup Ecosystem Discovery Missions with 200 participants from 4 Consortium hubs to Germany, Netherlands, France, Lithuania, Silicon Valley, and India in order to build awareness about the ecosystems and build bridges between them; (2) organize 40 ecosystem discovery mission follow-up events; (3) support the exchange of 60 speakers/mentors for Consortium hubs‘ events; (4) send 96 startups and scaleups from the 4 Consortium hubs for 1-month Soft-landing stays in the Destination ecosystems; (5) organize the European Soft-landing conference on startup migration, connecting startup ecosystems and soft-landing support; (6) produce a White Paper with policy reocmmendations; (7) provide practical advice on scaling and the available soft-landing support on the project‘s website www.soft-landing.eu and build the community around it. Consortium partners are veteran startup ecosystem development hubs, 3 of them have worked on the same Startup Europe projects before (Startup Scaleup, LIFE, Digistart) all of which have been succcessfuly implemented. The Consortium members understand the Call‘s objectives fully and drawing on their previous Startup Europe‘s project implementation experience have designed a practical, realistic and at the same time ambitious project that will connect European statup ecosystems and help startups and scaleups to scale.

B-HUB FOR EUROPE will target deep tech vertical startups in the blockchain domain. The initiative is aimed at: discovering high-potential innovations, shaping suited proof of concepts and business models, providing specialised acceleration services to overcome current market barriers and assist the go-to-market process, unlocking new market channels with potential private/public customers, scaling up innovative businesses across five startups ecosystems in Europe: IT (Rome), FR (Paris), DE (Berlin), LT (Vilnius) and RO (Cluj-Napoca).The initiative will build on the excellence of European blockchain high-growing innovations and will help startups to shape and offer high-tech solutions to address public challenges and business needs.Public and private actors involved will benefit from a tailormade knowledge transfer process on blockchain technologies and use cases for internal barriers removal and faster adoption.The project will open to follow-up initiatives beyond the project conclusion stimulating the uptake of blockchain solutions in the private/public sector, through procurement processes, joint collaborations and fund rising opportunities.B-HUB FOR EUROPE will provide to blockchain startups, accurately identified and recruited in the five ecosystems through dissemination and engagement initiatives, a set of customised, expert-based services aimed at: accelerating business perspective, providing mentoring and coaching, supporting access to finance, improving cross-border networking with the broad EU blockchain community. Collaboration schemes will be explored for co-creation processes between blockchain startups, public organisations, corporates, and SMEs. Connections and cross-border activities will be promoted to favour exchange among grown-up and less developed ecosystems.The project will contribute to the on-going efforts for a more favourable regulatory framework in the blockchain domain in Europe, with inputs and recommendations collected during the project life.

Lighthouse sets a standard on developing cross border connections within and beyond Europe. The project lights the way for startups within Europe by organising 8 Deep Dive Weeks in 4 ecosystems: Berlin, Dublin, Lisbon and the Baltics – meeting over 1600 different ecosystem players in specific themes such as fintech, refugee tech, e-gov, IoT, etc - and culminating with a Top 10 Lighthouse Award in London each year. Lighthouse will support directly over 120 startups to meet key people (investors, corporates, technological experts, media, customers, talent, etc.) in each of these ecosystems through matchmaking, 1-on-1 mentoring, workshops and many other activities. Furthermore, the best of the best of the selected startups will receive the chance to take part in our Europass programme - taking them to 8 of the biggest European tech events; as well as 1 week scouting missions to Silicon Valley, New York and Israel to accelerate their positioning as global players. Lighthouse’s top-notch support activities prepare startups to take advantage of the opportunities in external markets as well as providing qualified introductions to key players in new ecosystems: which all contributes to increased market success. In concrete expected impact, the project will help selected startups to obtain +2000 investment, partnership or customers leads, 500 new international customer leads, develop +100 adapted products/services to new markets, raise collective turnover by 50%, create +500 new jobs, raise +€50m in total investment and many more direct and serendipitous results. Lighthouse does not happen in a vacuum - its structure enables perfect integration with all Startup Europe activities - especially within Deep Dive Weeks. This exploits synergies between Lighthouse, Startup Europe and all related stakeholders by pooling resources together – encouraging even more ecosystems to take part in its activities.

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.

SUN (Space hUb Network) aims to increase the commercialization of space enabled solutions and growth of European start-ups and scale-ups in space downstream and upstream sectors by implementing a multi-dimensional concept. To increase the number of space applications being developed as well as involve SMEs into space sector, project will organize 4 Hackathons (at least 200 participants) and 9 Roadshow events for SMEs (attended by 480 stakeholders). In order to complement (instead of competing) existing European initiatives, these events will target stakeholders of specific industries that can mostly benefit from space technologies, for example, telecom, mobility, agriculture. Space entrepreneurs (at pre-startup stage), start-ups and scale-ups will receive an opportunity to participate in mentorship programme. SUN will be implementing 3 types of mentorship programmes based on the IRL & TRL level of each participant. In total, 80 start-ups and scale-ups will participate in mentorship programmes. Main goal of it will be to help startups advance their IRL and get access to finance. SUN will also conduct extensive ecosystem mapping and will aim to build bridges among current local and international initiatives supporting space start-ups and scale-ups. SUN will complement the initiatives by matching them with space entrepreneurs. Consortium has been formed to involve organizations specializing in space technologies and applications, incubation and business support, technical support, start-ups and community building. Project activities will take place in 6 countries (Austria, Ireland, France, Lithuania, Poland, Romania) but will target start-ups and scale-ups on pan-European level.