INNOTRACK Tracking innovative start-ups over time: witnessing entrepreneurial innovation as it happens
Although many innovative start-ups fail, those that grow into sizeable businesses can have a disproportionate impact on not only innovation, productivity, and employment, but also on our ability to tackle societal challenges. Start-ups can turn knowledge into innovations without having to protect established lines of business. Unfortunately, the EU's performance in fostering fast-growing, innovative start-ups, particularly Austria's, has lagged behind countries like the US for a long time. This puts in doubt the continent's prospects to fight climate change and regain technological sovereignty, which is understood as reducing one-sided dependencies on suppliers of critical R&D intensive products. Therefore, understanding start-up success and devising better policies is a pressing challenge, which could benefit policy makers, investors, and start-up managers.
Our proposed project offers a unique opportunity to track the highly R&D-intensive start-ups funded by the venture capital arm XISTA of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, a newly founded research institution ranked among the top 10 young research institutions worldwide. It pursues a holistic approach to start-ups, which benefit from technology transfer services, access to labs and infrastructure, office space, as well as venture capital support, all under one roof. Unlike existing start-up surveys or databases, we will have the advantage of gaining much more detailed data on the firms, observing and understanding the factors shaping their decisions and innovation performance in real-time.