Startups and Robots

We are pleased to announce the publication of the book "Robots and Startups: How they are reshaping the competition of European cities". This collection of studies, written by our staff and students provides an intriguing insight into the work of the Centre for Next Technological Futures at MCC.

The complete book can be purchased on the MCC Press website: Startup and Robots.

FOREWORD

As cyberpunk author William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.” This ironic statement is particularly relevant when we look at the map of innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems in Europe, where we can easily see deep regional imbalances. But while the future of technology is nearly impossible to predict—in part due to the nature of Schumpeterian creative destruction—it could be discovered. It could be discovered by those companies, the startups, whose basic working method is trial and error. And that’s the main reason why this little book is about startups and robots.

The Centre for Next Technological Futures (CNTF) was founded in 2021 at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest and pursues Alexander von Humboldt’s century-old idea of a mutually beneficial combination of research and university studies. The seven essays collected here in the first volume of Studies on Innovation, Technologies and Regions are the result of this type of research by student researchers and draw on numerous sources and inspiration from the work of CNTF.

First, in recent years, CNTF’s student researchers have presented their research results at the Eurasia Business and Economics Society (EBES) conferences in Berlin, Budapest, Lisbon, Madrid and Rome. These conferences provided them with excellent opportunities to discuss research hypotheses and methods and results, and in doing so, helped to further develop the research into publications.

Second, in 2023, the CNTF became a member of the Global Trade & Innovation Policy Alliance (GTIPA), a global network of more than fifty research institutes and innovation policy think tanks that strengthened policy thinking within CNTF. Participation in the Conference on Robots and Automation (CORA) in Frankfurt, Germany also led to increased interest in studies on robotisation.

Third, the various study trips organised by the CNTF to the main startup ecosystems around the world could equally be considered a valuable and integral source of research, for example the tours to Silicon Valley, Toronto-Waterloo, Washington DC, Israel, Singapore, London, Paris, Sevilla, and Warsaw.

In the first paper, Zoltán Cséfalvay outlines the geography of the scaleups (startups that raised more than one million euros in funding) in Europe. By analysing the data of more than 12,000 scaleups retrieved from Dealroom at the level of 166 functional urban areas in Europe, he highlights two main trends. The first is the strong concentration of scaleups in a handful of leading scaleup cities, while the second trend is the strong West-East and North-South divide in the European scaleup city landscape in terms of performance of cities in relation to startups.

Csaba Kristóf Johanyák investigates the impacts of locally available venture capital (VC) funds on startups at city level in Europe. Particularly, he focuses on the role of these VCs at different funding rounds. By applying the gravity model and using a dataset of nearly 3,500 VC fund transactions between 2012 and 2021 retrieved from Dealroom, he finds that geographic distance plays an important role in investment decisions, especially in the early development stages of startups. However, in later stages, as the distance between the investor and the investment increases, the amount of funding received by the startups decreases.

Orsolya Székely delves into a relatively less analysed topic of the supporting institutions in startup ecosystems, such as incubators and accelerators, in the case of Munich. The semi-structured interviews carried out with seven accelerators indicate that, while the selection processes and the programs provided are slightly similar in all accelerators investigated, there are significant dif ferences among them with regard to strategic, sectoral, and territorial focus.

In contrast, Viktor Lázár analyses those accelerators that revolve around environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. By conducting more than twenty semi-structured interviews, he distinguishes between accelerators aimed primarily at profit and those supporting ESG startups. He concludes that accelerators focusing on ESG startups can attract more non-corporate funding and have more extensive programs and less strict selection processes than their accelerator counterparts that only chase profit.

In another study, Viktor Lázár examines the technological specialisation of the Central and Eastern European countries (Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia) and compares this with the subnational innovation indices in the United States at state level. In this way, he identifies those US states with which cooperation of the CEE countries would be mutually beneficial in order to enhance the innovation potential, in particular at the level of startups.

Viktor Lázár and Máté Ujvárosi raise the question of what factors inf luence the adoption of industrial robots, in particular the development of robot density (measured as the number of industrial robots deployed per ten thousand employees in manufacturing) in 17 European countries between 2011 and 2019. To analyse the dynamics of robot density in time and the explanatory measures, they employ a fixed-effects model (FEM). As a result, they highlight that there are three factors of prominent importance, such as the labour cost in manufacturing, the business R&D expenditure, and the specialisation in industries in which industrial robots are deployed in a large-scale (e.g., automotive sector).

Zoltán Cséfalvay distinguishes two distinct stories in robotisation, that of the industrial robots and that of the robots in service sector. While industrial robots are deployed in large-scale but in very few industries, the service robots are currently deployed in small-scale but in widening application areas. His in-depth analysis of the service robot manufacturers based on IFR data between 2010 and 2021 reveals particular dynamics in which not only the large manufacturers but also the small robotics startups play a crucial role. Yet, both the service robot manufacturers are concentrated only in a handful of countries, while the robotics startups are in very few ecosystems.

The Centre for Next Technological Futures would like to thank the Mathias Corvinus Collegium for the support and excellent facilities provided for the research, the results of which are included in this book.

Prof. Zoltán Cséfalvay, 

Head of the Centre for Next Technological Futures, 

Mathias Corvinus Collegium, Budapest

The complete book can be purchased on the MCC Press website: Startup and Robots.