European governments are known for supporting green environmental policies, but it seems that they are now joining ACT’s crusade to improve the Tech Environment as well. The Portuguese EU Presidency Forum "Financing Innovation – From Ideas to Market" has adopted the "Estoril Declaration." The goal of this Declaration sounds positively ACT-ian:

The European Union needs to continue to develop a world-class environment supporting innovative and high growth Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs); an environment in which competitive markets work efficiently both within and across borders to allocate a range of appropriate forms of finance and related services, from professional and well informed providers to similarly competent entrepreneurs and their businesses at all stages of the enterprise life-cycle.

We’ll be taking a closer look at the proposals in the document, but the approach seems very promising for reversing the troubling lack of success on the Lisbon Agenda. It takes a holistic approach to improving the climate for European SME Innovators. The recommendations include:

  • Spin-out activities that commercialise intellectual property from universities and the research community should be encouraged. In particular use should be made of academic-private funding arrangements that recognise the demanding requirements of professionally-run and commercially attractive fund structures.
  • The support of Europe’s financial services community is essential in the identification and industry adoption of practicable means by which intangible assets, such as intellectual property, can be pragmatically valued in order to attract additional debt finance and other resources. This is important especially for innovative and technology-based start-ups.
  • It is essential that a full spectrum of SME’s life-cycle financial and support services are available for attractive growth enterprises, from ‘seed stage’ incubators through business angels, guarantee societies and debt providers, to corporate venturing and institutional venture capital funds.

If more governments were thinking this way, we wouldn’t see so many ill-informed proposals like this potentially devastating tax plan in the UK.