Start-ups in central and eastern European start-ups developing risky and game-changing innovations are struggling to get products to market, due to the legacies of communist times and poor access to private funding.
Putting the time, money and effort into the long and winding road of scaling up is pointless if companies do not reach the destination and commercialise their inventions, said Kinga Stanislawska, co-founder of the Experior venture fund in Poland and member of the European Innovation Council (EIC) board. Developing and doing projects is "absolutely wonderful" but start-ups "need to commercialise them."
In eastern Europe and Mediterranean countries including Cyprus and Greece, life for start-ups is a hand to mouth struggle from one funding round to another, because of the shortage of private investors. In some central and eastern European countries, the level of technology investment is historically "super-low", Stanislawska said. Overall, private investors in the region put in only one third as much as is raised by start-ups in western Europe, which as a whole is only one third of the amount of private capital raised by counterparts in China and the US.
