Who is behind
FUTURE 500 Initiative
Institutional Partners
Future 500 is led by IEDC – Bled School of Management, which provides the intellectual and institutional foundation of the initiative.
IEDC brings long-standing experience in leadership development, strategy, and engagement with business leaders and public institutions across Europe. Within Future 500, IEDC is responsible for shaping and stewarding the methodological approach underpinning the initiative — ensuring that scale-up potential is assessed through structured, evidence-based criteria rather than visibility or narrative alone.
This role reflects a broader European consensus: that better selection and earlier recognition are prerequisites for more effective capital allocation, policy design, and ecosystem coordination.
Founder of Future 500
Stjepan Orešković
Founder & Majority Shareholder, BOSQAR d.d., President of SB, IEDC
The Opening Forum: Leadership-Level Engagement
The initiative was publicly introduced through the Future 500 Launch Forum, held in Bled on 1 September 2025, alongside the Bled Strategic Forum.
The Launch Forum was designed as a closed, leadership-level convening, bringing together senior figures from policy, finance, and entrepreneurship to engage directly on Europe’s scale-up challenge. According to the official programme, participants included Jozef Síkela, European Commissioner, and Edi Rama, Prime Minister of Albania, alongside representatives from the investment and banking community, high-growth company founders, and ecosystem leaders.
The Forum was intentionally structured as a working dialogue, not a ceremonial launch. Its purpose was to confront a shared and recurring question across European policy and finance discussions.
Why does Europe continue to generate innovation at scale, yet struggle to scale innovation into global companies?
By convening policymakers, capital providers, and entrepreneurs in the same setting, the Launch Forum positioned Future 500 as a platform rooted in decision-making reality, where regulatory frameworks, capital constraints, and entrepreneurial execution intersect.
Transatlantic Perspective and Strategic Context
Future 500 is co-created in partnership with the Atlantic Council, including its Southeast Europe United for Success (SEEUS) initiative.
The involvement of the Atlantic Council brings a transatlantic and geopolitical perspective to the initiative, situating Europe’s scale-up challenge within global capital markets, industrial competition, and strategic resilience. This reflects the reality highlighted across EU-level discussions: Europe’s competitiveness must be strengthened within a global context, not in isolation.
Future 500 is designed to complement existing European and national instruments supporting innovation and scale-up growth, not to duplicate them. Its focus is on creating a shared analytical and convening layer that improves visibility of scale-up potential and strengthens coordination across ecosystems.
National and regional initiatives, thematic investment instruments, and EU-level programmes already play critical roles across the innovation lifecycle. Future 500 contributes by addressing a recurring gap identified in EU analyses: the absence of a structured, comparable, and repeatable approach to identifying scale-up potential early enough to influence outcomes.
Future 500 is intentionally structured as a long-term European initiative, anchored in institutional leadership, cross-sector collaboration, and methodological clarity.
It reflects a growing alignment across Europe that competitiveness is not only a matter of funding volumes, but of selection quality, timing, and coordination — and that scaling Europe’s best companies requires shared understanding across policy, capital, and entrepreneurship.