Milan as a hub for startups and digital talents

Just few months ago Financial Times described Milan as Italy’s biggest startup hub.

Talking about European best cases of “startup cities”, everybody can immediately think about Berlin, London, Paris or Amsterdam. But also Milan is becoming more and more attractive for the creation of new enterprises.

In Milan and in Lombardy there is the major concentration of the startup ecosystem players in Italy.

The research “The Italian Startup Ecosystem: Who’s Who”, promoted by Italian Startup and conducted by Osservatori Digital Innovation (Observers Digital Innovation) of MIP, the School of Management of Politecnico di Milano, with the institutional support of the Ministry of Economic Development – second edition October 2014, gives an interesting picture of the distribution by region of the actors that create a more favourable environment for the birth and development of startup.

According to this research, Lombardy is the Italian region with the biggest concentration of these actors: 34% of Funded Start-ups, 53% of Institutional Investors, 35% of Crowdfunding Platforms, 21% of Incubators and Accelerators, 13% of Science and Technology Parks, 31% of Coworking spaces, 17% of Fablabs, 35% of Startup Competitions.

More recent data (to date October 3^rd 2016, available here) confirm this ranking: Milan hosts now 14.7% of Italian Innovative Startups (936 out of 6,382).

Milan is home to some of the Italian top universities and Executive Business schools like Bocconi, SDA Bocconi, Politecnico di Milano, MIP Politecnico di Milano and Università Cattolica. All of them are raising their interest in startups, are offering professional training targeted to young entrepreneurs and can be good sources for startup talent pool.

Milan is also the best place in Italy for hiring digital talents (like Digital Marketing Managers, Chief Innovation Managers, Data Scientists), digital capabilities so scarce and so important in leading the drive to digital. Startups are, of course, attracting, nurturing and also releasing and dismissing generations of digital workers, but Milan is also an assessed ITC cluster (as described once here https://www.investinlombardyblog.com/2015/06/in-lombardy-the-tradition-of-clusters-generates-innovation-in-ict) training and retaining digital talents.

Cecilia Spanu, Marketing and Digital Strategist