Entrepreneurial structure operational at year’s end in Lisbon

Portugal’s secretary of state for digital transition said in an interview with Lusa that the European structure dedicated to entrepreneurship – Europe Startup Alliance of Nations, whose permanent representation will be in Lisbon, should be “operational in the last quarter of the year”.

Asked when this structure would be operational, André de Aragão Azevedo said he expects this to happen in the last quarter of this year.

“We are finishing what the formalization of the constitution is”, he explained, adding that this implies that each member state appoints its representative, which respects a set of administrative and legal formalities.

“Our goal is that in the third quarter, we have the structure formally constituted. We are now also launching the contact network so that all countries identify who their focal point is so that we can start working as a network so that, basically, it can be operational in the last quarter of the year,” the minister explained.

Asked about the location of the European structure in Lisbon, which has been contested, Azevedo was adamant: “It will be in Lisbon. That was what the prime minister announced and that was also what somehow resulted from negotiations with the European Commission”.

He explained that the location of the Europe Startup Alliance of Nations “is not an individual choice of the Portuguese government. Instead, it was a process that took place over several months where several competing countries and several cities were also interested in this location”.

The choice was Lisbon “because in this international panorama it was the city that presented the strongest arguments”, in addition to the fact that the Portuguese capital is also host to the technological summit Web Summit.

Asked about what the European structure would do specifically, Azevedo said that “it will immediately monitor compliance” with the standards approved by the 27 EU countries.

He mentioned that to monitor. A data platform would be created to collect “much more objective and much more reliable information about what is happening in each country” regarding entrepreneurship.

Europe is not homogeneous in terms of maturity in terms of entrepreneurship: “there is a series of countries that are at the forefront, and others that are a little bit later and what we want is to monitor each of the countries individually, provide that information to the governments” of each of them “so that they can also take the necessary corrective measures” and have “an integrated vision”, he explained.

The idea is that there is a notion of ‘startup’ Europe, he said, pointing out that another of the areas is the attraction of talent.

“We want to create instruments that can promote the attraction to the European area of more qualified executives” and, “from this point of view, we intend to launch something that resulted from today’s conversation which is a European ‘startup visa’, that is, the ability to have a collective European approach that can attract people with high qualifications, with a more entrepreneurial profile”, he added.

He also defended that the national entities of each of the member states work as a network.

“We have Startup Portugal, and Spain has a similar entity, and we want them all to work like a network so that there is this notion of a single European market for entrepreneurship”, he stressed.

Basically, “what we want is that a Portuguese ‘startup’ – when it wants to internationalise – does not have to deal with 26 legal systems and 26 countries that are different countries, we want it to work as a single market similar to what happens, for example, in the United States”, he pointed out.