As indicated in the future “EU 2020 strategy”, the EU need to further promote the incubation and growth of small innovative firms, across smarter economies & territories, with smart specialization, thanks to smart people and networks.

This should be done quickly but by synchronizing policies, programs and operators, by creating a more favorable regulatory and higher education environment, by enabling cross-border mobility, by integrating Research & Innovation policies, by injecting more Entrepreneurship into Research, by stimulation the demand, securing critical mass of finance, providing better support to SMEs, ensuring openness and engagement!

Without enhancing entrepreneurship, without more and better start-ups & spin-offs, without engaged entrepreneurs, without non-technologically based-innovators, without business & market-oriented applications developers, without a collaborating & open mindset, without IT-aholics serial players, and without early-stages efficient support mechanisms, the fight against recession and the challenge to build a more competitive & inclusive Europe will be more difficult, and maybe impossible to achieve.

 It’s vital to incorporate “innovation-based incubators” (BICs) within Innovation Systems, where all core competences & stakeholders collaborate smartly along the various value chains with engagement, pragmatism, credibility, efficiency.

Professor Isaac Getz, a top-ranked visionary from ESCP Europe Business School, went straight forward into pragmatic examples of world-class innovation by small business. He insisted very much on the power of freedom, responsibility, and engagement of people inside the organization. Companies grow when employees grow!

Pietro Moncada-Paterno-Castello studies the dynamics of “gazelles” at the EC Institute for Prospective Technology Studies (IPTS) and is clearly seeing  three roles for smart enablers, such as BICs: early-stage “content” enabler, “context” enabler, and “networking“ enabler. Their challenges relies in their capacity to ensure both integration & differentiation.

The Burgos congress was also providing a “voyage initiatique” across various non-European fascinating experiences with the aim to discover new models & practices of individual & collective support mechanisms for small innovative firms. Travel started in Quebec City with Car Viel, the CEO of the POLE Economic Development Agency, who showed that integrating local small business support with int’l territorial marketing is making senses and that each bricks of this integrated approach feeds the other.

Later, Yossi Smoler, the Director of the Technology Incubators Programe in Israel, an iconic reference for European BICs & Incubators, explained why and how the Israéli incubators had been privatized mainly by Venture capital company, while maintaining a public granting system for the best-in-class start-ups only.

The Brazilian economic miracle is an impressive reality, and this has happened also thanks to a down-to-earth vision of the Brazilian government having given power & freedom to the national small business agency SEBRAE, and thanks to the down-to-earth action of the place-based strogly engaged Brazilian Incubators and technology parks. That’s what Sao Paulo University Professor Ary Plonsky , current Chairman of ANPROTEC, shared with us, making inspiring analogy with the DNA (a new base called “Innovatine”)

Down-to-earth is paradoxally also a value shared by Frank Salzgeber, the man behind Technology Incubation & Technology Transfer at the European Space Agency (ESA): bringing the excellence of space and satellites applications down into technology based start-ups and SME, that’s exactly Frank’s motto through the ESA-EBN driven network of Incubators (ESINET), another example that Innovative entrepreneurship has no frontiers.

Europe’s frontiers are also changing and the horizons of the EBN, initially Europe-centric, community is also becoming progressively global. A demonstration of this change is the collaboration between EBN and the World Bank InfoDev programme, which aim at creating and upgrading a network of Incubators across developing and emerging countries. Ellen Olafssen, its deputy director travelled from Washington DC to Burgos, on its way to Africa and South-East Asia. Ellen created a lot of emotion when showing the video about the Incubator downtown Accra in Ghana. Emotion, and the strong feeling that we all share common values, everywhere in the world. The values that give power, coherence, consistency and respect to our community.

Following this excellent plenary session, the finalists smart entrepreneurs had the chance to exchange with more experts, who literally gave the rhythm of the whole event and various workshops:

• Juan Pablo Vasquez (professor at the IE Business School in Madrid),
• Roland Harwood (one of the best, if not the best European expert in Open Innovation),
• Bernard Katzy (Professor of Innovation management at the Universities of Leiden & Munich, and incidently co-founder of the Living Labs network),
• Frank Detée (the Innovation Director of the Auchan group and a close EBN partner),
• Mike Morris (another EBN industrial partner, a former start-up: Cisco systems !),
• Augusto Medina (professor at the University of Porto and founder of the Portuguese Society for Innovation, SPI),
• Martin Graham (Chairman and CEO of CMX and former number 2 of the London Stock Exchange),
• Jose-Luis Curbelo (Director of Orkestra, the Basque Competitiveness institute), etc etc.