Innovation funding and startup growth: the kick-off of EU direct investment

Giordano Mion () and Aminata Sissoko ()
Additional contact information
Giordano Mion: ESSEC Business School
Aminata Sissoko: European Commission

EU research and innovation paper series from Directorate General for Research and Innovation (DG RTD) of the European Commission

Abstract: In this paper, we have conducted an econometric analysis of the impacts of the Accelerator scheme of the European Innovation Council (EIC), with a particular focus on the EU Blended Finance providing for the first time grant and direct equity - quasi-equity investment, by means of a difference-in-difference framework combined with propensity score matching and using firms who obtained a Seal of Excellence as control group. Our analysis highlights a number of significant impacts of the EIC Accelerator on firm performance measures like sales, capital stock, wage bill, average wage, employment and value of deals. The analysis also highlights the payment of the EIC direct equity investment as a key root of heterogeneous impacts on firm production factors and output and the lack of a differential impact for projects related to health.

Keywords: company growth; direct investment; EU investment; EIC fund; innovation; research and development; start-up (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G24 L26 M13 O31 O33 O38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 69 pages
Date: 2026-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publi ... 75ed71a1/language-en (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eug:wpaper:ki-01-26-025-en-n

DOI: 10.2777/7345358

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EU research and innovation paper series from Directorate General for Research and Innovation (DG RTD) of the European Commission
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Paolo Pasimeni, Head of Unit, DG RTD unit G1 ().