Following agreement with the European Commission to include a city within the map, the first stage in the process was to source the government registry data for each country/city.
The city boundary was defined on the EuroStat NUTS (Nomenclature of territorial units for statistics) classification.
The registry data was filtered to select all companies with a registered address falling within one of 20 selected NUTS boundaries. These companies were then auto-matched against the CrunchBase dataset using company name and city.
The next stage was to filter out all companies with turnover above €20 million unless they were present in the CrunchBase dataset. This approach was agreed with the European Commission as a pragmatic solution to dealing with some of the inherent weaknesses in the source datasets. The rationale was that this approach would remove larger corporations but still enable the map to identify those businesses that have scaled quickly.
All of the remaining companies were geo-coded to generate a latitude and longitude for the registered office and them these companies and their associated data were place on the map. This included the following:
- Company name
- Registration number
- Sector
- Formation date
- Registered office filing
- Date of most recent filing
- Number of employees reported in most recent filing
- Turnover reported in most recent filing
- Investment raised
Finally, once the individual companies were matched we then ran another auto-matching exercise to identify companies that have expanded across multiple European jurisdictions via subsidiaries. Where a company was identified formation dates were compared to identify the ‘parent’ company and ‘children’. We then generated a network visualisation linking ‘parents’ and ‘children’ across the hubs.
Alongside the technical build and development of the map the project has involved detailed fieldwork across the 20 hubs – all of which are at different stages of development and maturity. Through this fieldwork the project team has engaged with over 200 entrepreneurs, investors, accelerators, co-working spaces, government officials, universities, businesses, network groups and other market influencers and shapers. These stakeholders have been engaged through a combination of semi-structured interviews and facilitated workshops.
A note on data
It is important to note that gathering consistent business data has been a significant challenge for this platform. Some countries have accurate, comprehensive records of business activity. Other countries have patchy, out of date information. This makes it difficult to present a consistent picture.
Few jurisdictions release company data as free or open datasets. In most cases a significant fee is levied for providing data. Within the scope of the project it was only possible to obtain a one-off snapshot from each jurisdiction. It would have been preferable to acquire a complete historic picture with quarterly updates of new data but the cost would have been far beyond the resources available to the project.
These challenges grow when the focus of the analysis is primarily on web entrepreneurship and tech startups, neither of which appear consistently within the data. In addition, the sector information available from government registries is too patchy to provide a reliable differentiator. An approximation can be provided by filtering out all companies that have not raised investment. However, this obviously understates the true picture.
Faced with these challenge through the Dynamic Map we have sort provide the widest possible array of data which can then be filtered according to user interests and requirements.
Grant Thornton UK LLP and Trampoline Systems have obtained the data on this platform from a range of databases, in particular CreditSafe UK, Crunchbase Inc., Bureau van Dijk and AngelList Limited. We have not independently verified that this data is accurate, complete or up to date. It should be used as a guide only. Users should consider the appropriateness of this data in the context of their specific requirements and carry out any further relevant research or checks, or confirm information from another source, if it is sufficient importance for you to do so. Any third party who chooses to rely upon our work shall do so entirely at their own risk.