ATHENS: A taxi-tracking tool, a head-hunting engine and a vertical gardening company —all business startups that have paradoxically emerged from a Greek economy long in the doldrums.
Faced with the worst unemployment wave in living memory, Greece’s youth are turning away from the traditional pursuit of civil service or family-centred jobs, and towards innovation and foreign funding.
“If I can make it here, I can make it anywhere,” muses Petros Boskos, a 35-year-old architect.
Alongside two of his friends, Boskos created Verdical, a company designing “vertical” gardens for the sides of buildings.
“It was basically my last chance to stay in Greece,” he said on the sidelines of a business innovation fair in Athens earlier this month.
Until recently, most Greeks fresh out of university contemplated life-long job security in a civil service post, or guaranteed employment in their family-owned business.
But that’s no longer an option.
The four-year Greek economic crisis killed off thousands of small and middle-sized companies, and staff cuts and hiring freezes imposed by the cash-strapped state has made new public sector hirings all but impossible.
One in two youths under 25 is currently out of work.
“The public sector and daddy’s store have lost their sheen,” says Aristos Doxiadis of Openfund, a venture capital fund.
Enter the innovation incubator.
In the last five years, at least eight such initiatives — offering advice to budding entrepreneurs with bankable ideas—have opened in Athens.
“We know that the Greek economy in its current form has no future,” states Giorgos Vrachnis, manager of Egg, a business startup incubator backed by Eurobank, one of the main Greek lenders.
“But it will take time to invent a new, outward-looking model. The domestic market is too small,” says Vrachnis.
Part of the challenge lies in the established mindset in Greek universities, where corporations and non-state funding are viewed with suspicion. “I grew up learning that businessmen are not good people,” says Boskos, the young architect.
Egg has a stable of 25 startups receiving one-year mentoring from industry experts in various sectors. Verdical, the garden designers, have won the right to stay for a second year.
The campaign is assisted by European Union funds—some 70 million euros earmarked under the Jeremie programme that helps small and medium-sized companies. A number of nascent Greek funds like Openfund have been assigned to distribute the money.
According to Endeavor, a global non-profit organisation supporting entrepreneurship that opened a Greek branch in 2012, the sector has grown exponentially in the last four years.
AFP
