Despite many attempts to develop high-impact VC policies during the 1990s in Europe , most VC markets in Europe are still underdeveloped. Many of these policies were based on ‘traditional’ VC policy involve a mix of monetary incentives and institutional changes. In this paper, we present an alternative evolutionary VC policy, which is based on a dynamic analysis of emergence processes and on the co-evolution between VC and entrepreneurship. In addition, this perspective is based on a dynamic and adaptive view of VC policy during the industry development.
The paper presents four case studies of VC development: Israel, UK, Scotland, and Germany. The insight from these cases is that successful evolutionary VC policies relies on few major factors:
- a strategic objective and a long-term commitment to enhancing VC market and high-tech cluster emergence and development
- a phased-policy portfolio including both direct and indirect VC-policy components
- a dynamic policy process, which is adaptive to the specific context
