Tremendous effort is (justifiably) being directed towards developing the European startup ecosystem — from founders and VCs to accelerators, TTOs, and funding agencies. The goal? Nurturing founders into globally ambitious, commercially savvy leaders. These resource-intensive programs deliver early boosts, but benefits are often short-lived. A recent global meta-analysis of accelerators found that while these programs improve early-stage performance, evidence for long-term strategic outcomes (like scaling, innovation, and sustainable growth) is limited (more on this below).
This pattern helps explain why Europe continues to face systemic challenges in translating innovation into scaled ventures — a bottleneck we’ve also seen in the research-to-impact pipeline, where early activity stalls without sustained structural support.
"Starting and scaling up innovative companies in Europe remains difficult today. From transitioning from lab to market, to accessing capital and talents, to a successful exit, European startups and scaleups still face significant challenges."
The report quoted above highlights the stakes. Between 2008 and 2021:
- Nearly 30% of European unicorns relocated outside the EU.
- Only 8% of global scaleups are based in Europe.
In the Netherlands, where Eunovus is based, similar patterns emerge. The State of Dutch Tech 2024 by TechLeap emphasizes that transforming a small fraction of startups into scaleup stages could unlock outsized economic value, while optimizing tech transfer practices and fostering founder pipelines remains crucial.
Short-term, fragmented support cannot unlock Europe’s full innovation potential. Founders need continuous, structured, and ecosystem-wide support — and the institutions that back them must align, coordinate, and sustain their efforts. This post explores common European startup support mechanisms, why they often fall short, and practical ways to create lasting founder impact.
The Current Landscape of Founder Support in Europe
Europe’s startup ecosystem is rich with initiatives aimed at helping founders grow and scale. Workshops, accelerators and incubators all play a vital role. It is important to note that the effectiveness of these initiatives varies widely depending on program quality, design, and delivery.
Startup incubators and accelerators in particular require substantial resources. According to a European Commission analysis, the average setup cost of a public incubator is around €4 million, with public funding covering a large share of this investment. Operating costs are ongoing, and public funding typically accounts for about 37% of annual revenue. Equity-based accelerators and incubators supplement this with direct support to startups, typically providing €50,000–€150,000 per venture in exchange for equity, along with mentorship, network access, and workspace.
Given these significant costs and the limited capacity, it is crucial to ask whether these programs deliver sufficient returns, or whether, as with EU research funding structures, leaner and more adaptive approaches might deliver higher impact at lower cost. Current evidence suggests that while accelerators and incubators can provide modest improvements in startup performance, effect sizes are often small or unquantified, making it difficult to determine whether the financial and resource investment is justified. More rigorous, quantitative evaluation is needed to assess the true ROI of European startup programs for founders and funders alike.
Workshops for Startup Founders
Workshops provide targeted, practical information on fundraising, business modeling, or regulatory compliance, among other topics. However, anecdotal reports suggest that founders often revert to old habits after attending, limiting long-term behavioral change required to produce successful startups. While workshops risk having limited long-term impact on startup success (in part because innovators tend to revert to the comfort of familiarity), they often serve as useful entry points into more exclusive and intensive support programs such as accelerators or incubators. This tiered approach allows founders to gradually access more resources and guidance as their ventures mature.
Accelerators: Performance and ROI
Accelerators have longer trajectories than workshops, concentrating significant expertise, networks, and capital in programs typically lasting several weeks. Meta-analytic research shows that these programs often yield modest gains.
What We Know About Accelerators (Meta-Analysis, 2025)
A new meta-analysis of 21 studies on accelerators worldwide provides the clearest picture yet of how these programs affect startups. The findings are encouraging — but also highlight why one-off programs aren’t enough.
The Upside
- Tangible performance gains: Startups that participate tend to raise more money, grow revenues faster, and are more likely to survive.
- Design really matters: Longer programs, larger cohorts, sponsorship (public or private), and even perks like office space tend to boost outcomes.
- Smaller firms benefit: Early-stage ventures gain disproportionately, and accelerators in emerging markets fill ecosystem gaps.
The Limits
- Modest overall impact: The average effect is small (correlation ≈ 0.10 — statistically significant but small in practical terms).
- Short-term emphasis: Gains are strongest in financial performance; evidence for strategic or long-term outcomes is weaker.
- Highly uneven results: Effectiveness varies widely by program design, geography, and venture profile.
- Biased evidence base: Published studies skew toward positive outcomes, and many accelerators select advantaged firms.
It is worth noting that the small effect size can still be meaningful at the ecosystem level and translate to measurable performance gains for startups in aggregate.
The Takeaway
Accelerators work, but their impact is generally modest. They are associated with better financial outcomes, like fundraising and revenue, but evidence for long-term strategic growth, innovation, or scaling is weaker and inconsistent. Program design, venture characteristics, and ecosystem context strongly influence effectiveness, highlighting that accelerators are a helpful but not transformative support mechanism.
Why might the gains from accelerators be so modest? Many accelerator programs focus heavily on technical readiness and investor pitch skills, and operate within short time frames. After the program ends, many founders revert to previous practices, limiting the venture’s growth relative to its potential.
As we explored in Why Great Innovations Stall, even breakthrough EU-funded project outcomes often fail to reach the market when commercialization and adoption activities are under-resourced. The same gap applies to startups: without deliberate structures to validate assumptions, engage stakeholders, and embed adoption planning, momentum from accelerators quickly dissipates.
Incubators: Long-Term Support and Impact
Compared with accelerators, incubators typically engage startups over a longer period and provide more intensive resources. While qualitative evidence suggests benefits through mentorship, networking, and operational support, robust quantitative evidence of their effect on startup performance is scarce.
Evidence from outside Europe suggests that incubators are associated with startup performance through mentorship, networking, and structured support.
- In Canada, startups participating in accelerators or incubators show ~14% higher employment growth and 13% higher revenue, but the study does not separate accelerators from incubators, so the effect attributable to incubators alone is unclear.
- In the U.S., incubator programs are associated with improvements in startup survival, revenue growth, and innovation, although exact effect sizes are not reported.
- In Indonesia, a qualitative study involving focus group discussions with startups identified key success factors for business incubators, including financial support availability, tailored expert guidance, collaborative networks, and market linkages. Quantitative effect sizes were not provided.
These studies, while quantitatively limited and region-specific, suggest incubators may have meaningful impacts. They are context-dependent, and applicability to the European ecosystem may be affected by differences in funding availability, regulatory frameworks, and the maturity of local startup networks.
A 2019 report by the European Commission and OECD provides additional nuance:
Business incubation programmes on their own do not necessarily lead to positive outcomes for tenant entrepreneurs and their firms. Some research shows that business survival is only improved by business incubation if the entrepreneur goes beyond the formal workshops and training offered by the incubator or accelerator by also seeking advice and assistance from their networks, partners and/or other public support programmes.
- Policy Brief on Incubators and Accelerators that Support Inclusive Entrepreneurship (2019)
Taken together, these findings suggest that incubators can work, but their effectiveness depends on program quality, founder engagement, and ecosystem context. Given the substantial investments required to set up and run incubators, the modest or unquantified performance gains highlight the need for more rigorous ROI analyses to determine whether incubators justify their costs.
Success Factors for Accelerators and Incubators
The lack of extensive quantitative evidence for the efficacy of incubators, and the low effect size of accelerators, does not mean these programs are ineffective. Existing research identifies key success factors for incubators and accelerators.
Success Factors for Incubators and Accelerators
A systematic review of 1,614 publications on incubators and accelerators from 2022 shows that startups benefit most when programs support the accumulation of the following forms of capital over time:
- Human capital: Skills, knowledge, and capabilities of both the founding team and program staff, including mentoring, training, and education that help founders improve managerial, technical, and entrepreneurial competencies.
- Social capital: Networks and relationships connecting founders to mentors, peers, investors, and partners. Strong social capital enables access to resources, knowledge, and market opportunities, which is a major mechanism through which incubators and accelerators support venture growth.
- Organizational capital: Infrastructure, governance, and service offerings provided by the program, such as office space, labs, funding support, and structured processes. Organizational capital helps ventures operate efficiently, coordinate activities, and leverage program resources effectively.
These factors are a step in the right direction, but more work must be done to quantify the benefits in relation to the investment made.
A Forward-Looking Perspective: Beyond Traditional Programs
While accelerators and incubators provide valuable resources, their measured impacts are often modest and context-dependent. Effect sizes are small or unquantified, and the long-term benefits for startups remain difficult to pin down.
But what if the value of these programs could be extended, reinforced, and made accessible to more founders? What if the skills, networks, and momentum gained in accelerators didn’t fade after demo day—or if founders who never got into a program could still access structured guidance?
We’re exploring how to apply lean thinking—the same approach that has unlocked durable innovation in other domains—to create low-cost, continuous, and actionable support for founders. The idea isn’t to replace existing programs, but to help founders internalize and build on what they learn, whether they’re in an accelerator, just starting out, or scaling on their own.
This isn’t about abandoning what works—it’s about making it work better, for more founders, over the long term.
If you’re a founder, we’d love to hear: What kind of support would have helped you scale more reliably?
If you’re part of an organization that backs startups—whether as an accelerator, investor, or corporate partner—we’d love to discuss: How could smarter, leaner support systems improve outcomes for your portfolio or ecosystem?