Читать книгу Hamburg's Entrepreneurial Ecosystem And The Next Media Initiative - Moritz Philip Recke - Страница 13

According to the KfW Startup Monitor 2015, Hamburg is the second largest startup location in Germany after Berlin. The city has a startup rate of 2.36% for the years 2012-2014 (as opposed to 2,6% in Berlin) and is further closing the gap in recent years. It has been the second largest startup location from 2008-2010 and from 2012 onwards (Metzger 2015). Even in 2003, more than 10 years ago, Hamburg had the highest Entrepreneurial-Acitivity-Quote (EAQ) in Germany (Losse 2004) and was one of the major centres for startups (Rooney 2012).

As city states, locations like Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen largely benefit from their metropolitan areas, accumulating startup activities within their vicinity. With highly attractive industry sectors such as media and IT as well as related creative industries, Hamburg has a disproportionately high rate of freelancers among new entrepreneurs (2014: 46%) compared to other locations in Germany (Metzger 2015).

Apart from freelance entrepreneurs, Hamburg also has a considerable history of high-growth ventures. Many Hamburg based startups have become well established, international corporations such as Innogames, Bigpoint, Coremedia, Facelift, Goodgame Studios, Jimdo, mytaxi, Parship, Statista or XING. Recently funded startups of note include Dreamlines, Kreditech, Protonet and Sonormed. Many international internet corporations subsequently chose Hamburg for their German headquarters over the years, such as AOL, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Hootsuite and Yelp (nextMedia.Hamburg 2016c). Just recently, hyped U.S. based startups such as Airbnb and Dropbox chose Hamburg for new office locations as well (Tracey 2016).

In accordance with the strong growth of the local startup economy over the past years, the City of Hamburg wants to position the metropolitan area as a leading region for innovation in Europe until 2020.

Among other actions, the city plans to invest more than EUR 100 million into a “Smart-City” and the local startup economy (Tangermann 2016), although concrete implementation strategies for this plan remain to be announced as of November 2016.

Evidently, Hamburg has been a vibrant location for innovative startup activities over the past decades. Not only was Hamburg at the epicentre of the dot-com era in Germany, it provides an attractive entrepreneurial ecosystem to aspiring founders that has strong ties with the media industry.