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Europe+ SME & Startup Challenge Atlas

The Business Innovation Hub flagship study examines connected growth constraints and pressures facing SMEs, startups, and succession-exposed companies across the EU27, United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Norway.
Published: 2026-01-31 Updated: 2026-07-17 Researched by Business Innovation Hub Author: Business Innovation Hub Research Team
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A comparative atlas for the Europe+ region

The Europe+ SME & Startup Challenge Atlas is the Business Innovation Hub flagship study. It examines challenges facing SMEs, startups, scale-ups, and succession-exposed owner-managed companies across the EU27, United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Norway. Instead of a loose list of problems, it uses a multi-level model: individual and firm decisions are considered alongside team, market, institutional, and European-system conditions. <a class="cite" href="#ref-1">[1]</a>

What the atlas makes visible

  • Liquidity, payment discipline, and financing often interact with management and investment decisions.
  • Skills, leadership capacity, and organisation determine whether young and growing companies can turn opportunities into results.
  • Regulatory and administrative fixed costs affect smaller organisations differently from large ones.
  • Digitalisation, innovation, sustainability, governance, and succession are not separate subjects: they influence growth, resilience, and transition capability together.

Methodological frame

The atlas triangulates official business-demography data, firm surveys, institutional monitoring, and venture-ecosystem evidence. It deliberately distinguishes broad enterprise births from the narrower venture-oriented startup perspective. Findings are interpreted across six levels: individual, team, firm, ecosystem, national institutions, and supranational systems.

Practical use

The study is not a country ranking and not a context-free instruction manual. It helps owners, support organisations, and leadership teams understand the connection between an observable constraint and its second-order effects – for example between labour shortages, missing leadership capacity, delayed digitalisation, and restricted scaling capability.

The complete edition includes country profiles, a source register, and the full methodological discussion.

References

  1. Business Innovation Hub Research Team (2026). Europe+ SME & Startup Challenge Atlas. /research/downloads/europe-plus-sme-startup-challenge-atlas.pdf