Inc. Magazine Inc. 5000 Europe

THE SECOND ANNUAL Inc. 5000 Europe list—which recognizes the private companies with the fastest growing revenues over three years—shows how entrepreneurship continues to spread from the established likes of England, Sweden, and Germany to next-generation economic players like Latvia, Lithuania, and Hungary. The new founders on the Continent are “young, digital, hungry, self-confident, and smart,” says Jacqueline Fendt, scientific chair of entrepreneurship at ESCP Europe Business School. Incubator and accelerator programs continue to ramp up and technical schools produce thousands of engineers each year—and while all that is encouraging, so is the strength in manufacturing and construction, the sectors that placed the most companies on the current 5000. NUMBER OF COMPANIES PER COUNTRY SWEDEN 554 UNITED KINGDOM 538 FRANCE 451 SPAIN 387 ROMANIA 333 FINLAND 324 HUNGARY 280 SLOVAKIA 216…

The most exciting startup scene you have never heard of isn’t in Seattle or London—it’s in Scandinavia. The Nordic countries, particularly Sweden, have the highest percentage of unicorns per capita in the world, and have developed more successful brand-name billion-dollar startups--Spotify, Skype, and Klarna to name a few--than any other region besides Silicon Valley and Beijing, which has 17 in a metropolitan population of more than 20 million people in a greater provincial area of more than 100 million. After speaking to several leaders in the Nordic region’s startup ecosystem, I’ve found clear reasons for its success. DEFINING THE MEANING OF CLUSTER Startup ecosystems invariably thrive in strong clusters. The Valley, which encompasses San Francisco, Palo Alto, Mountain View, San Jose, and more talented engineers per capita than anywhere on…