Promoting innovative and high growth firms (own-initiative opinion)

EESC opinion: Promoting innovative and high growth firms (own-initiative opinion)

Key points:

The EESC

  • encourages the Commission to pursue its efforts to develop policy proposals aimed at promoting the creation of innovative and high growth firms;
  • recommends that these initiatives are conducted, led and coordinated by a single unit responsible for assessing, monitoring and achieving synergies between innovative policies delivered by different DGs;
  • demands that these policy proposals should:
    • strengthen the single market;
    • reinforce the clusters and ecosystems in which innovative start-ups are created;
    • develop the equity component of the European capital markets;
    • encourage an academic agenda focusing on jobs for the future and
    • minimise the cost and red tape involved in starting a new entrepreneurial venture.
  • calls for the Commission to continue its work on long-term harmonisation projects such as accounting and insolvency standards, automatic recognition of professional and academic qualifications, accelerated implementation of the digital single market strategy and the full deployment of the Capital Markets Union initiative;
  • requests that the development of new types of collaboration between universities and businesses be strengthened across Member States;
  • asks of the European Investment Fund (EIF) and the European Investment Bank (EIB) to support innovative firms with specific venture and seed capital to facilitate technological transfer from universities and research centres;
  • recommends the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI) as a model for future EU budgets, moving from a traditional grant-based method of financing projects to a more efficient investment-led model, which would crowd in funds for projects.