On Tuesday 10 March, the European Commission presented its Industrial Strategy. Alongside the strategy, it presented the new SME Strategy for a sustainable and digital Europe, focusing specifically on SMEs. Whilst European Entrepreneurs CEA-PME welcomes the fact that the Von der Leyen Commission decided to present a specific strategy for small businesses – in contrast to the Juncker Commission – our members are all but impressed with its dated contents and lack of fresh ideas.
It is discouraging to see that, 12 years after the launch of the Small Business Act for Europe, two out of the three pillars of the new SME Strategy are exactly the same as in 2008: regulatory burden and access to finance.
We expect European SMEs to digitalize rapidly, whilst at the same time living up to a very ambitious European Green Deal. We want SMEs to innovate and to stay in Europe to scale up, but the lack of access to finance and tremendous regulatory burden pushes them out of the EU.
We expect entrepreneurs to make use of the full potential of the Single Market, whilst small businesses suffer the most from the many Single Market barriers by single member states. Great ambitions require innovative ideas, which we are not seeing enough of.
