The FUTURE 500 INDEX
Making Europe’s scale-up potential visible
Europe does not lack innovation.
It struggles to scale it.
According to the European Commission, OECD, and European Investment Bank (EIB), Europe combines strong public R&D investment, world-class universities, and high start-up creation rates — yet consistently underperforms in scale-up outcomes and global growth leadership. Fewer than 10% of European start-ups become scale-ups, and Europe accounts for less than 20% of global unicorns, despite comparable innovation inputs.
The gap is not about ideas. It is about execution, structure, and the conditions that enable companies to grow at scale.
The Future 500 Index exists to make this gap measurable.
It is a data-driven framework designed to identify Europe’s most promising scale-ups — not through hype, popularity, or one-off success stories, but through signals that indicate structural capacity to scale across markets, sectors, and stages.
Built by research. Anchored in policy. Designed for action.
The Future 500 Index is developed by an international, interdisciplinary research consortium spanning management, economics, health systems, and applied AI — ensuring both analytical depth and real-world relevance.
The Index is developed in collaboration with leading European institutions, including: University of Oxford (UK), University of Edinburgh (UK), ESMT Berlin – European School of Management and Technology (Germany), University of Zagreb (Croatia), BILDAI Institute (Slovenia), Blue Ribbon Partners (Germany) and is led by IEDC – Bled School of Management (Slovenia).
Its conceptual foundations are aligned with established European policy and analytical frameworks, including insights from the European Commission, EIB / EIF, OECD, and ongoing work on EU competitiveness, Capital Markets Union, industrial strategy, and strategic autonomy.
This structure ensures that the Index is methodologically rigorous, politically neutral, and directly relevant to Europe’s strategic priorities.
From insight to action
The Index is not an end in itself.
It is the analytical backbone of the broader Future 500 initiative, designed to connect measurement with decision-making.
By identifying patterns, gaps, and strengths across sectors and regions, the Index supports:smarter and more targeted capital allocation, better alignment of policy instruments with scale-up realities, and evidence-based dialogue between founders, investors, and public institutions.
This is where analysis meets ambition — and where Europe’s next generation of growth companies becomes visible.
Not another ranking. A different lens.
- measurable growth and capability signals,
- long-term competitiveness factors, and
- alignment with Europe’s economic, digital, and sustainability objectives.
Why this matters now
Europe is entering a decisive decade.
Industrial transformation, deep-tech commercialisation, the green and digital transition, and Europe’s ambition for strategic autonomy all depend on one central question:
Which companies can scale — and under what conditions?
This question is increasingly reflected in EU-level work on competitiveness, capital markets, and industrial resilience. Yet until now, Europe has lacked a shared, evidence-based reference point for identifying scale-up potential in a systematic and comparable way.
The Future 500 Index translates this challenge into evidence.
It provides a common analytical language for entrepreneurs, investors, institutions, and policymakers who need to act — not speculate.