Hamburg's Entrepreneurial Ecosystem And The Next Media Initiative. Moritz Philip Recke

11: Founding year of startups monitored by Hamburg Startup Monitor

      Ruffly half of all listed startups are in the “startup stage”, more than 150 are in the “later stage” and more than 100 are in the “seed stage” (see fig. 12). Interestingly more than 120 startups made no indication to their stage of development, indicating either a lack of expertise to categorise the startups stage or refusal to participate in efforts to create transparency within Hamburg’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

      Figure 12: Startup stage of startups monitored by Hamburg Startup Monitor

      Combined with the startups’s age, interesting key performance indicators (KPIs) could be established over time. It might be interesting to monitor not only how many firms exist for how long, but how long it took them to reach certain stages of development.

      Combined with data on business models and funding this could be extended to analysing how long it takes certain startups with specific business ideas under given funding conditions to reach a certain stage. Unfortunately despite historic data not being available yet, the necessary data on startup funding in Hamburg is not reported and might in fact be hard to obtain in a credible manner.

      Figure 13: Number of employees by industry in startups monitored by Hamburg Startup Monitor

      Other interesting data points collected by the Hamburg Startup Monitor show how many jobs are “created” by Hamburg based startups, 5460 as of November 2016 (see fig. 13). If historic data were available in the future, this might help to evaluate startups’ potential for job creation, one of the main arguments behind many innovation policy agendas promoting entrepreneurship around the globe.

      To assess this data objectively it would be necessary to verify these numbers with official employment data provided by municipal government. In addition it might be prudent to evaluate employment statistics in related industries to survey wether certain jobs might be “destroyed” or “displaced” by innovative business ideas. Again this might be difficult to do since necessary data is unavailable but would be relevant to assess the impact of entrepreneurial activity on economic growth and job creation in Hamburg.