FIX Cluj — youth entrepreneurship and talent-retention programme (Cluj-Napoca)

FIX Cluj is an annual youth entrepreneurship and talent-retention programme run by the City of Cluj-Napoca in partnership with Cluj Startups. Launched in 2019, it targets young people aged 16–26 who live, study, or work in Cluj-Napoca, addressing the city's concern over the brain-drain of highly educated youth to other European cities.

The programme operates in three phases:
1. Ideation & validation (Phase 1): teams receive €3,000 in micro-grants to test their concepts.
2. Business development (Phase 2): selected teams receive €12,000 to refine their product or service and build a customer base.
3. Scale-up (Phase 3): the strongest ventures receive up to €35,000 plus two months of custom mentorship.

Each annual edition manages up to €825,000 and supports up to 40 teams. Funding is mixed: City of Cluj-Napoca (public), AROBS, BCR, Bosch, NTT DATA, Vitrina, Numa Film (private), and Fondation Botnar (international philanthropy).

The programme has been validated as an EU Interreg Europe good practice under the label 'FIX Cluj: Empowering Youth Entrepreneurship to Retain Talent and Drive Local Innovation'. Participants who remain in Cluj-Napoca and grow their ventures constitute the core retention outcome; many cohort companies have continued to trade and expand in the city.

Romania (RO) is absent from the Evidoria City Innovation Library before this entry.

Read the full analysis: https://www.fixcluj.eu/