Explosive growth in the number of startups that turn into a scale-up

23 November 2017

The number of startups that grows into a fast-growing company – or scale-up – grows immense, on the other hand, the growth of established companies is lagging behind. This is one of the conclusions of the Scale-up Dashboard 2017 produced by Erasmus Centre for Entrepreneurship (ECE), a part of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM). The Scale-up Dashboard is a yearly research on fast-growing companies in the Netherlands led by prof.dr. Justin Jansen, Academic Director of ECE and Professor of Corporate Entrepreneurship at RSM.

A fast-growing company – or scale-up – is a company with a minimum of 10 employees or a revenue of 5 million that grows with at least 20 percent per year for three consecutive years. The most important findings of the Scale-up Dashboard 2017 are as following:

The number of scale-ups in the Netherlands has increased to 3,237. This is an increase of 5.4 % over the last year.
Scale-ups have created 39,000 jobs in the Netherlands over the past three years.
There is an explosive increase in the number of startups able to develop into scale-ups. Only 98 startups developed into scale-ups in 2014, but this number more than tripled to 331 in 2016: an increase of about 220 %. Today, one in ten scale-ups in the Netherlands originates from a startup.
An increasing number of companies in the Netherlands is showing hardly any growth, or none at all. Moreover, almost 33 % of Dutch companies are actually shrinking.

Prof.dr. Justin Jansen explained more about the research on BNR early this morning; listen it back here. Also prince Constantijn van Oranje, special envoy of StartupDelta, talked about scale-ups in the Netherlands and this research on BNR later today; relisten it here.

The download the full Scale-up Dashboard 2017 and more info about this research: www.scaleupdashboard.com