European startups fail to scale, which often is the reason why they also fail in general. To avoid this, Startup ecosystems have to be connected and support the flow of startups from one ecosystem to another. Like nature‘s ecosystems, startups follow the path of least resistance or rather of the biggest opportunities, flowing like rivers downstream, from smaller ecosystems to the larger ones. Following such logic, this Project will connect smaller startup ecosystems to the larger ones through building awareness and capcaity for scaling and providing Soft-landing support. Soft-Landing Project will: (1) organize 40 1-week Startup Ecosystem Discovery Missions with 200 participants from 4 Consortium hubs to Germany, Netherlands, France, Lithuania, Silicon Valley, and India in order to build awareness about the ecosystems and build bridges between them; (2) organize 40 ecosystem discovery mission follow-up events; (3) support the exchange of 60 speakers/mentors for Consortium hubs‘ events; (4) send 96 startups and scaleups from the 4 Consortium hubs for 1-month Soft-landing stays in the Destination ecosystems; (5) organize the European Soft-landing conference on startup migration, connecting startup ecosystems and soft-landing support; (6) produce a White Paper with policy reocmmendations; (7) provide practical advice on scaling and the available soft-landing support on the project‘s website www.soft-landing.eu and build the community around it. Consortium partners are veteran startup ecosystem development hubs, 3 of them have worked on the same Startup Europe projects before (Startup Scaleup, LIFE, Digistart) all of which have been succcessfuly implemented. The Consortium members understand the Call‘s objectives fully and drawing on their previous Startup Europe‘s project implementation experience have designed a practical, realistic and at the same time ambitious project that will connect European statup ecosystems and help startups and scaleups to scale.

The aim of the innovation action STARTUP SCALEUP is to build a European ecosystem around four consolidated entrepreneurial ecosystems in Spain (Cloud Incubator HUB), the Netherlands (Crosspring Lab), Lithuania (Open Coffee Club) and Ireland (The Ryan Academy) and the largest social network for startups in the European Union (F6S), in order to provide a greater range and quality of services to ambitious entrepreneurs who want to launch and grow companies focused on the Internet of Things and Services (IoTS). These four ecosystems, who have a track record and complementary strengths, will be able to support startups by enhancing the basic business skills of the entrepreneurs to strengthen the business sense of their startups,testing the soundness of technological concept and its uniqueness in the market, providing early exposure to EU market access, enabling talent matching and providing Venture Capital groups and other financiers with access to a critical mass of startups. To achieve this aim under the call topic (ICT-13-2014, web entrepreneurship), the STARTUP SCALEUP will: • Analyse which of their current services are best-in-class, assess which of these can be offered on a non-local scale and then design and implement a new service model to their entrepreneurs. • Set up an online platform for mentoring, networking and training through which the ecosystem members can share knowledge, experience, and contacts to support the startups, transcending geographical, cultural and resouce-related barriers. • Generate awareness and interest in STARTUP SCALEUP by developing a specific communication strategy that enables us to to attract the most talented startups to the ecosystem, pull in resources and publicize the activities of the ecosystem • Run two sequential acceleration programmes in order to create IoTS-based companies and the validate and readjust the STARTUP SCALEUP ecosystem and services. • Set up a dissemination plan to maximize the expected project impact.