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Abstract
The upstream of talent from universities is widely recognized as a crucial element of sustainable startup ecosystems. Therefore, this paper aims to answer the questions: How does access to this talent affect the performance of different European cities in terms of startups and what is the role of universities in this performance? To answer these questions, in June 2022 we retrieved data from Dealroom.co for almost 20,000 scaleups (startups that have raised more than €1 million in funding) headquartered in Europe and matched them with the EU-OECD classification for Functional Urban Areas (FUA). For measuring the scaleup performance of European cities, we applied three variables–number of scaleups, total funding of the scaleups and number of scaleups with a market valuation of more than €200 million–and by using k-means algorithm we were able to identify 143 FUAs, i.e., scaleup cities with notable performance, consisting of 16,850 scaleups. As for access to talent, we retrieved data from Dealroom.co for around 60,000 startup founders who attended a university of a European scaleup city. Linear regression analysis shows that the number of scaleups correlates well with access to university talents (R2 = 0.76), there is an albeit slightly weaker relationship between total funding for scaleups and access to talent (R2 = 0.59), and the number of scaleups valued more than €200 million also correlateswith access to talent at the same level (R2 = 0.63). Though, there is a heteroskedasticity here as the OLS model was 0.55. This is due to the strong territorial concentration, as only nine cities (London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Barcelona, Dublin, Amsterdam, Munich, Madrid) are responsible for more than a half of all scaleups in Europe, while a handful of cities (Paris, London, Barcelona, Madrid, Copenhagen, Cambridge, Dublin, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Milan, Berlin, Munich) do the same to founders who attended university in a scaleup city. At university level, the concentration is even more pronounced, as while there are 1,145 universities in the scaleup cities, more than a third of startup founders come from just 30 universities.
