Rise Europe Summit 2024 at IE University: an alliance to boost European technological entrepreneurship

IE School of Science and Technology hosted last week Rise Europe Summit 2024, a pivotal event gathering representatives from 18 leading institutions of 13 European countries to empower the next generation of start-ups and secure long-term prosperity in Europe.

This network of leading European start-up centers kicked off their four-day summit at IE Tower, the vertical campus of IE University in Madrid, and then moved to the University’s historical campus in the UNESCO city of Segovia to continue exploring the strategies to foster a unified ecosystem that enhances Europe's role and competitiveness.

The alliance, launched in Elmau, Germany, in 2023, works to reinforce Europe as a leading SciTech hub helping European start-ups scale and become sustainable global market leaders capable of addressing the new global challenges. 

Since May 2023, innovation drivers of Europe’s most dynamic entrepreneurship hubs have joined forces within the Rise Europe network to merge the individual ecosystems into one and to contribute to European technological sovereignty.  

“As an entrepreneurially-driven, rigorous polytechnic, and as members of Rise Europe, we join forces to enable Europe’s new economy by catalyzing the continent’s fair share of ventures, scale-ups, and unicorns”.
Ikhlaq Sidhu, Dean of IE School of Science and Technology, IE University

“We need a new culture of entrepreneurship in Europe to tackle challenges such as the climate crisis, energy transition or new technologies," highlighted Helmut Schönenberger, CEO of UnternehmerTUM (Germany).   “What we are doing here is connect the dots where we are really strong and, by bringing our strengths together, we can balance these start-ups much better.”

In its inaugural year, the network focused on the areas of joint start-up support, community building on European level and the communication as one European ecosystem.

The focus of this year's summit was the creation of a formulated joint Vision for Europe 2030, public affairs activities in favor of start-up scaling, a pan-european AI incubation program and the improvement of cross-national matchmaking of start-ups and corporates.

As a vision for Europe 2030, the fundamental goals set were for Europe to become the best place to grow the new economy by contributing one third of global solutions. Specifically, this entails ⅓ of startups, ⅓ of scaleups and ⅓ of unicorns.

This network should also transform Europe from a world leader in research to a world leader in economic, societal, and environmental impact, while carrying on as the best place to live and work.

The leading entrepreneurial voices and European tech incubators convene these days at IE University also set concrete cornerstones of the collaboration in the second year of the community, such as the creation of a pan-European AI Incubator, a cross-institutional, pan-European program for highly-driven sciencepreneurs to create the next European AI champions.

They also agreed influencing European public affairs together by increasing the joint engagement with policy makers and driving and hosting joint activities in Brussels, as well as forming a Rise Europe ambassador network bringing together influential advocates for Europe from the world of innovation and entrepreneurship, industry, politics and arts.

Reflecting the first year 

A notable achievement in the first year of Rise Europe was the publication of a European Scale-up Navigator. The Navigator provides start-ups that are considering to internationalize with valuable insights, resources, and strategies to navigate the European innovation landscape and achieve sustainable success. Also, the alliance published a European Start-up Landscape to give Europe’s ecosystem more visibility. The landscape demonstrated the impact of the group’s members which inspired 38,000 talents on the topic of entrepreneurship and supported 2,300 start-ups on their entrepreneurial journey in the previous year. All together, these start-ups received 7.8 billion Euros in venture capital funding. 

The next Rise Europe Summit is planned for May 2025 in Copenhagen.

Rise Europe is a collaboration of representatives from: Aalto University, Agoranov, Beta-i, Campus Founders, DTU Skylab, École Polytechnique, ETH AI CENTER, ETH Zurich, HighTechXL, IE University, Imperial Enterprise Lab at Imperial College London, INiTS, KTH Innovation, EnSpire Oxford at Oxford University, Sting, TalTech, DCU Invent, UnternehmerTUM and Yes!Delft, which joined this year.

Rise Europe members come from Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom.