InvestHorizon Policy Conference | Brussels, 23 April 2015

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face various challenges. Although this sentence has appeared in so many discussions about entrepreneurship, there are still many questions that need to be addressed. One of such questions is the fragmentation of investment market, which a group of international business professionals, enterprise support organisations and research institutions has decided to tackle with the InvestHorizon programme. It is a project funded with support from the European Commission with the aim of increasing investments made in innovative European SMEs. In order to help enterprises, investors, intermediaries (incubators, accelerators, education institutions) and policy-makers working on venture policies, the InvestHorizon team has decided to organise the InvestHorizon Policy Conference on 23 April in Brussels.

About the event

The conference aims to present new insights into investment readiness. There will be presented new strategies, tools and needs in fields such as access to finances, matchmaking, etc. If you would like to receive updated information about investment opportunities for your business and interact with European policy-makers, entrepreneurship experts and other entrepreneurs, this event is a good option to consider.

Programme

InvestHorizon Policy Conference is a one-day event with a five-session agenda. The event will open up with a plenary session in which some speeches will be given. Wolfgang Burtscher, Deputy Director General of the European Commission Directorate of Research and Innovation, will talk about boosting investment readiness of European enterprises. William Stevens, Founder and CEO of Europe Unlimited, will introduce the main objectives of InvestHorizon. Colin Mason, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, will present the newest trends in investment readiness programmes. Erik Vermeulen, Professor of Business and Financial Law at Tilburg University and Tilburg Law and Economics Center (TILEC), will share the key findings of InvestHorizon assessment.

After the opening speeches, there will be a round-table discussion on the topic: State-of-play and challenges to support R&I driven SMEs, moderated by Prof. Vermeulen. The panel will consist of Robert Sanders, Head of International Projects at EBN European B.I.C. Network, Ben Butters, EU Affairs Director at EUROCHAMBRES, Adrienne Lotos, Head of Office at the European Crowdfunding Network, Brigitte Baumann, Founder and CEO of Go Beyond, and Simona Grobelnik, Development Advisor at the Slovene Enterprise Fund.

Later there will be 2 workshop sessions. Conference participants will have an opportunity to participate in 2 workshops out of 3. The first workshop will present the best practices and recommendations on investment readiness. The second one will provide information on investor sensitisation. The third one will focus on (cross-border) matchmaking.

Finally, in the closing plenary session some final results will be presented. In addition, the Better Practices Contest will be introduced.

More information can be found on the official event website.

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The author of this text is Birute Birgelyte, PR and Communications Trainee at Startup Commons. You are free to re-edit and repost this in your own blog or other use under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License terms by giving credit with a link to www.startupcommons.org and the original post.