Releasing Entrepreneurial Potential for Independent Professionals and The Self-Employed - EFIP Common Position Paper -
General Considerations Independent professionals are entrepreneurial at heart; working on a self-employed basis and taking on the risk and cost of downtime, both within and between projects. They enable innovation driven businesses to tap into diverse talent on a variable cost basis, which makes these businesses agile, flexible, forward looking and internationally competitive. Hence, the EU should encourage selfemployment as a flexible, innovative and entrepreneurial way of working that enables businesses to perform more cost-effectively, especially when recovering from the recession.
Policy Recommendations Independent professionals and self-employed people typically represent a new model of entrepreneurs, called solo-entrepreneurs or solopreneurs, the key characteristics of which are: 
They work by themselves keeping their businesses at a manageable size, without the intention to hire employees and/or to grow into a micro-enterprise or a company.
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They can begin to trade immediately without needing infrastructures, large funding, a business plan and often learn business skills as they go.
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They measure growth in unconventional ways, balancing income generation with business autonomy, flexibility, long term self-reliance and personal well-being.
Solopreneurship also has the potential for positive effects on the labour market integration of specific groups of workers. This mainly relates to people who cannot or do not want to do a full-time job, for example due to care responsibilities, pursuit of education or ill health or beneficial for workers in remote or rural areas with limited job opportunities. Entrepreneurship services including the Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs Programme need to reflect these requirements by creating support that is relevant to this more informal and quickly growing segment of the EU labour market made of solopreneurs. Against this backdrop, EFIP supports the EU Commission ambition to reach 10.000 Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs exchanges per year by 2020. Offering training and general start up services to entrepreneurs are quite common good practice examples in the EU. However, the challenge for many entrepreneurs and the self-employed is to carry out an in-depth analysis of their own business and business model and identify improvements and future opportunities. The real need therefore is specialist advice, one-to-one coaching and personalised mentoring tailored to the individual entrepreneur, which could be offered through a 1|P a g e
virtual platform and a European network of mentors. Innovation vouchers - which already exist in some Member States for SMEs - may allow self-employed people to buy innovative consulting services and know-how, and should become more widespread. In the review of the EU Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan implementation, the EU should promote collaborative schemes whereby independents could team up with other independents to pool their talents and address more complex challenges in the marketplace. Joining forces with other independent professionals and the self-employed allows them to more effectively compete with larger firms and offer a broader range of services, including the opportunity to bid on larger projects than they would be capable of doing on their own. Collaborative forms of entrepreneurship lead to better work-life balance and results in upskilling and efficiency gains for the self-employed. Structures like coworking spaces and business incubators, which may be run with the support of the Enterprise Europe Network and the EURES National Coordination Offices, could greatly assist to bring about these changes.
About the European Forum of Independent Professionals (EFIP) EFIP is a European not-for-profit collaboration of national associations which represents over 11 million of independent professionals at EU level through targeted research and advocacy. Independent professionals (often referred to as freelancers or contractors) are highly-skilled selfemployed workers without employers nor employees. They offer specialised services of an intellectual and knowledge-based nature and work on a flexible basis in a range of creative, managerial, scientific and technical occupations. With a 45% increase since 2004, they are the fastest growing segment of the EU labour market. EFIP mission is to strive for European policy, business and social environment to become more conducive to the independent and self-employed way of working, in both the private and public sectors. More information about EFIP is available on our Website, our Manifesto and our Campaign.
Contact Marco Torregrossa Secretary General European Forum of Independent Professionals Avenue de l’Opale 124 box 6 B-1030 Brussels (Belgium) +32.486.71.30.26 marco.torregrossa@efip.org www.efip.org EU Transparency Register N.: 823591710024-95
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