Digital Assembly in Bratislava: "Putting the Digital Single Market at the heart of Europe" - Main contents

More than 750 participants gather for the 2016 Digital Assembly in the capital of Slovakia. The event is co-organised by the European Commission and the Slovak EU Presidency and brings together policy-makers, representatives of industry and academia, start-ups and NGOs.

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, Vice-Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini, and my colleague Commission Vice-President Andrus Ansip are among the high-level speakers, and this afternoon I will give a keynote speech on the Digital Single Market.

This conference provides ample opportunity to discuss and exchange ideas with a wide range of stakeholders on the EU's digital policy, and in particular the creation of a Digital Single Market in the EU. Topics include the digitisation of European industry, e-commerce and online platforms, connected and automated driving, the fair use of roaming rules and Europe's way to a gigabit society.

A special focus will be on scaling up companies. We all know that technology-based entrepreneurship is emerging as a key building block of the digital economy. New businesses account for nearly all net new job creation, and there are now more and more successful scale-up stories in Europe like Spotify, Blockchain or Deliveroo.

The Digital Single Market is paving the way for European companies to scale up in Europe but more start-ups should follow the path of already successful companies: they should be able to kick off and scale up in Europe, and then expand globally, in markets like United States or India.

Tomorrow, the start-up community will put forward their recommendations on how to remove barriers to growth and allow start-ups to reach scale across borders.

We have already developed several initiatives to help our companies scaling up in Europe and globally, and to encourage entrepreneurship and the emergence of new start-ups. For instance, with the Startup Europe initiative, we have helped the European start-up ecosystem by connecting and creating synergies between hubs. On the international level, initiatives such as Startup Europe comes to Silicon Valley or Startup Europe India network are excellent ways to stimulate networking, create business opportunities and open new markets.

To find out more about the Digital Assembly see: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/digital-assembly-2016-bratislava#Article or follow us on Twitter #DA16eu