Nurturing and growing innovative start‐ups: the role of policy as integrator

Nurturing and growing innovative start‐ups have become an important point on the political agenda. After the dotcom bubble, however, many financial schemes and incubation initiatives initiated, in the mid‐nineties, were cancelled or down scaled. There was a consensus that innovative start‐ups need more than just money. Networking and coaching were identified as additional needs. Besides this, there is a change in the intensity and nature of these needs during the different stages of the early life cycle. In this paper we make an in‐depth study of three approaches to nurture and grow innovative start‐ups. Each of these initiatives embeds in a very different national innovation system: Chalmers Innovation in Sweden and Anvar/Banque de Développement des PMEs in France, and Sitra's PreSeed Service in Finland. Each approach is compared in terms of its financing, networking, and coaching support, along the different stages of the start‐up's life cycle.