Frankfurt/Brussels, 27 May 2025 – Hartmut Rauen, Deputy Executive Director of the VDMA, comments on the European Commission's Startup Strategy, which will be presented this week:
 

• "Startups play a crucial role in the European machinery manufacturing industry when it comes to breaking new ground in innovation. Startups are quick to translate future trends into new business. Cooperation between young entrepreneurs and established companies is therefore an important driver of innovation and future viability. One focus of the Startup and Scaleup Strategy must therefore be to promote cooperation between startups and medium-sized industrial companies.”

• "The Startup and Scaleup Initiative must be used as a lever to simplify EU legislation and advance the European Single Market. Whether it's different rules for starting a business in member states or complicated rules for accessing capital, startups are the litmus test for the EU's plans for innovation-friendly regulation. For example, startups as well as SMEs in industry, suffer particularly from complicated rules for product conformity, which unnecessarily slow down-market entry."

• “The VDMA's ‘Startup Machine’ platform shows how manufacturing companies and startups can come together successfully with benefits for both sides. Here, things that belong together grow together: the unique technology culture and customer focus of mechanical engineering and a new culture of innovation and new technologies brought in by young startups.”

      Hartmut Rauen, Deputy Executive Director at VDMA  

VDMA represents 3600 German and European mechanical and plant engineering companies. The industry stands for innovation, export orientation and SMEs. The companies employ around 3 million people in the EU-27, more than 1.2 million of them in Germany alone. This makes mechanical and plant engineering the largest employer among the capital goods industries, both in the EU-27 and in Germany. In the European Union, it represents a turnover volume of an estimated 870 billion euros. Around 80 percent of the machinery sold in the EU comes from a manufacturing plant in the domestic market.