Prof. Cséfalvay recalled at the press conference of the final event of the national road show Smart Specialisation – A path towards the efficient use of the EU funds between 2014-2020 that BudapestHUB working team was first convened in September this year by calling together the representatives of the Hungarian start-up movements and the Ministry of National Economy.

According to this Working Group, Budapest needs to build-up a critical mass of start-ups, find its comparative advantages and rely on local characteristics in order to become the Start-Up Hub of Central and Eastern Europe.

The experts emphasized the importance of education and urged the support of

• (so called spin-off) companies with the ability of utilizing the results of university researches;
  
• start-up incubators;
  
• university professors and researchers to acquire the practical business knowledge and experiences.
  

The experts also underlined the need for private business academies.

The Working Group agreed to deliver a study on how to better access financial resources. Currently 133 billion Hungarian forints in the form of venture capital is "looking for a place", yet there is a lack of finances at the so-called pre-seed and seed stages. Therefore, experts suggest that these stages should receive a greater attention in the use of domestic and EU funds in the upcoming years.

The experts also identified taxation as an existing burden for start-up companies and investors, called for tax facilitation and recommended certain changes.

The English version of the credo prepared by the working group can be downloaded from here: Budapest 2.0.2.0 Runway - The Startup Credo PDF (1 125 KB)

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