The Balkans is Heating Up with Startup Ecosystem Digitalization

​Startup Commons, along with Swiss EP and US AID, continues supporting Startup Macedonia to help build its position as an ecosystem operator to orchestrate, moderate, coordinate and manage information and communication for Macedonia ecosystem.

Following the initial mission in January, the following mission was carried out in May to build consensus and common alignment with the main ecosystem players within Macedonia ecosystem, whose level of understanding and awareness have increased on this tour around the need of setting up an ecosystem operator for Macedonia ecosystem. Additionally, the value of digitalizing the ecosystem is becoming more and more relevant and many ecosystem actors in Macedonia are discovering the value of data to improve their own operations as well as the whole ecosystem performance. This has been the trigger to start working on designing a piloting project aimed to make ecosystem data visible and enable the data to start flowing among the different ecosystem actors.

Macedonia is taking the lead in the Balkans when it comes to implementing a data-driven approach at ecosystem level for data-driven policy making, measuring service performance, defining funding decisions, enabling matchmaking, etc., but Serbia has already started to move towards the direction too.

Startup Commons was selected by Swiss EP for a short mission in Belgrade to start introducing such ecosystem operator concept as well as fundamentals of startup ecosystem development framework for a first batch of key ecosystem actors  in order to start opening discussions around the topic but with mid/long term perspective of identifying the most suitable organisation capable of orchestrating and moderating Serbia ecosystem.

In general, there is a clear need of bringing more coordination and visibility at ecosystem level to benefit all ecosystem actors in Serbia and the national government is willing to take the lead in that regards. Therefore, it is now the time in Serbia to continue building momentum around this topic as well as explore how the government could help to initiate a process towards a more structured, coordinated and data-driven ecosystem.

See also: “Connecting the Macedonian Ecosystem, 2018“ - research following Startup Common’s framework for ecosystem development, where Startup Macedonia engaged in conversation with startups and support organization to identify key challenges and opportunities for an ecosystem growth.

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