Track: Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Abstract

A startup ecosystem is a set of interconnected entrepreneurial actors, entrepreneurial organizations, universities, public sector agencies, financial bodies, and entrepreneurial processes, which formally and informally coalesce to connect, mediate and govern the performance within the local entrepreneurial environment. Over the last 5 years we have witness to the emergence of the digital start up entrepreneurship phenomenon, with an exponential growth on the number of active startups. This paper sets to analyse if start ups in Nordic and Mediterranean ecosystems have different choices in terms of economic sector, business model and the pricing model. We have analyzed the Mediterranean region constituted by Lisbon, Madrid, Rome and Athens and the northern region constituted by Malmo, Stockholm, Amsterdam and Helsinki. The study used the database of F6S, the leading online platform for the startup community with over 490 000 registered startups,  having analyzed a total of 5573 start ups. The study concludes that there are clear common trends in both Nordic and Mediterranean regarding business models (mainly B2C) and pricing models (mainly Freemium), but low communality regarding economic sectors.