Milan startups: Trying to measure the maze

Chamber of Commerce panel

On July 20, Mariella and I, owners of the new Chaoyang Creative Works PR and content agency in Milan, attended a meeting on business startups hosted by the Milan Chamber of Commerce.

I understood little because it was in Italian, but you don’t need to speak the language to sit through two hours of Power Point presentations that contain a bewildering number of lists and requirements.

The opening speaker noted that bureaucracy is one of the main barriers to startups and innovation in Italy – and that was immediately followed by presentations with a mind-numbing range of bureaucratic hurdles that must be cleared to start a new business and try to get a financing boost.

One of the speakers told the sparse crowd of hopefuls that it takes six months to get a company registered, and it is even better to wait until next year.

What does that do to the few young dreamers with a new idea in the audience? Are they still going to be on fire next year?

We registered our new company in six weeks.  And it was indeed a bureaucratic maze of documents, stamps, seals and agencies.

But we didn’t wait until next year.

Sant'Ambrogio

The number of new businesses has grown a bit, we learned, and the business community and government seem to recognize the need to help startups – in theory. But thus far it seems their answer is to form yet more agencies that simply repeat the vast lists of requirements – then their salaried employees quickly leave the meeting at its conclusion.

And like the rest of Milan, the building is beautiful, complete with a fine statue of Sant'Ambrogio, patron saint of commerce and also of Milan.