“Five years: that’s the magic age for start-ups everywhere. Once you’ve reached that milestone, your future as an innovative entrepreneur starts to look very bright—and your chances of turning your start-up into a successful scale-up skyrocket. According to Eurostat, the EU’s statistical office, no place in Europe provides a more advantageous environment for reaching that landmark company age than Belgium and its autonomous northern region, Flanders.

To innovate successfully, you must not only keep an open mind, you also need to bring together bright minds from various backgrounds. That’s exactly what Flanders’ cluster policy has been successfully doing since the 1980s. Albeit relatively small in size, the region is home to five universities that work closely with companies, competence centers and government institutes to innovate in line with societal and industrial needs—spawning promising start-ups by the day.

According to the 2017 European Innovation Scoreboard, Flanders even ranks as European #1 when it comes to R&D collaborations between the academic, public and private sectors. This is most evident at Flanders’ four strategic research centers, which are backed by the government and easily accessed by businesses. Their research covers some of the world’s most advanced domains, including digital and nanotech (imec), biotech (VIB), sustainable technology (VITO) and smart industry (Flanders Make).

The war for talent is waged heavily in innovative business segments. But instead of focusing solely on winning it, start-ups and entrepreneurs can also take a different approach by proactively developing the talent right in front of you. In Flanders, start-ups and scale-ups can easily work with and under the wings of universities and university colleges. This not only allows you to leverage the bright minds these institutes nurture, but also to help shape their talent and skills in line with industry needs.

To give you an idea of how this can benefit your business: today, Flanders is already home to the world’s 3rd-most talented workforce according to the 2017 IMD World Competitiveness Ranking. Talk about skillful shoulders to innovate on!”