nowEurope

I’m pleased to announce that we’re now preparing to introduce a new round of contributors to nowEurope, the members of the CITT consortium. CITT is an EU project co-funded under the 7th Framework. I’ll let our CITT project leader, Zuzana Lettner, tell you more about CITT. My purpose with this post is to tell you a little about where we’ve been and where we’re going.

I’ve always been fascinated with how new technologies get turned into businesses. When I started nowEurope, back in 1995, I was interested in meeting people in Europe who wanted to start businesses on the Internet. We talked about business models, investments and exciting new startups. Several of my readers went on to meet each other, face to face, and a few of them even launched businesses together. This current iteration of nowEurope isn’t so different. However, the circumstances have changed.

The Internet is now maturing as a market place, however innovation continues online and off. Entrepreneurship is no longer an ugly word in Europe, and yet it is still relatively rare.

This is particularly true in Central Europe. For example, Hungarians are some of the innovative people in the world. You may have heard of Andy Grove (Intel), Charles Simonyi (Microsoft) and George Soros - just three prominent Hungarian innovators that come to mind. And yet Hungary, and Central Europe as a whole, is still not a terribly innovative place to do business.

The reasons are familiar to those of us who live in the region: lack of capital and managerial experience, cultural inertia, tax and regulatory barriers, small markets, credibility issues abroad and a heartbreaking lack of trust doing business at home.

Much of this is changing, albeit to those of us watching and doing business here it often seems at a snail’s pace. nowEurope hopes to do its small part to make business innovation and entrepreneurship more mainstream by highlighting the success stories, issues and opportunities as well as introducing people to one another. And CITT provides us with just that chance to carry on this mission.