Leading business experts agree that it is much more important for politicians to support entrepreneurial policies based on the development and refocusing of existing businesses rather than focusing exclusively on the creation of new companies.
In recent years, we have witnessed a significant change in entrepreneurial attitudes in countries all over the world, which has led to a dramatic proliferation of programmes and accelerators dedicated to start-ups. The term "startup" has entered common parlance and it is now difficult to find a city large or small that does not have its own entrepreneurial development programme.
It is worth specifying here that "startup" means a new organisation or a new enterprise seeking a repeatable and scalable business model. There are other types of new enterprises, which are sometimes improperly referred to as start-ups, but instead arise as a result of company re-launches, patent spin-offs or strategic partnerships with synergistic companies to exploit new technologies or make efficiencies.
The equation 'entrepreneurship = startup' is not wrong but it is incomplete. On the one hand, it seems that the most important and difficult step for entrepreneurs is to launch their own company or a new venture; on the other hand, it almost seems as if the advice is "the more the merrier", i.e. the more start-ups there are, the more successful the programme supporting them will be. We know, however, that quantity is not always synonymous with quality.
If we think of "entrepreneurship" as the creation of value, then it is clear that value can be created in many ways: acquisitions, reorganisation, technological spin-offs, relaunching initiatives and assets that are undervalued or underused.
The lesson that many case studies nowadays give us in pages and pages of academic studies and financial reports is the following: growing is much more difficult than we think than making startups. We must therefore focus our attention on growth immediately after the startup. It is important to support innovation, but it is equally and perhaps more important to support development, otherwise we risk having financed something that will remain in an embryonic phase and will never succeed in emerging, with the risk for the community that the initial investment will never be repaid, e.g. with further entrepreneurial activity, taxes and jobs.
On average, less than 1 in 100 start-ups scale up. A startup lives for one goal and one goal only: to innovate the market with a product or service that is so valuable that people want to use it. This is why start-ups are often prone to taking risks early in their life cycle.
On the other hand, scale-ups are companies that already have a product that has allowed them to have a position within the market: for this reason they can be aggressive but by consolidating the position they have achieved, they can test a new solution on different areas (product, business organisation, etc.) for longer. Moreover, they will manage projects and people differently: as they already have a margin they will be able to raise the bar by focusing on more effective internal communication or investing in their employees.
Finally, the leadership skills required to manage a start-up are different from those required for a scale-up. The skills required to hire, train and mentor team members vary greatly. In a scale-up - which is a more adult type of company - it is important to "tap" into new skills from outside.
For these reasons, it is important to recognise the role of the scale-up in the Italian landscape - it is very often those innovative small and medium-sized companies that drive the economy of our country.