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

Cluj-Napoca is Romania's second city and a growing regional tech hub, but city authorities identified a persistent risk of brain-drain, with highly educated young people leaving for other European cities. FIX Cluj was launched in 2019 by the City of Cluj-Napoca in partnership with Cluj Startups to give people aged 16–26 who live, study or work in the city a structured path from idea to venture, so that talent has a reason to stay.

The programme's core aim is talent retention: turning young people's business ideas into functioning startups that keep them — and their ventures — based in Cluj-Napoca, rather than losing them to larger European tech centres.

FIX Cluj runs in three funded phases: an ideation and validation phase offering EUR 3,000 micro-grants to test concepts, a business development phase providing EUR 12,000 to refine the product and build a customer base, and a scale-up phase offering up to EUR 35,000 plus two months of custom mentorship for the strongest ventures. Each annual edition manages a budget of about EUR 825,000 and supports up to 40 teams, funded through a mix of the City of Cluj-Napoca, corporate partners (AROBS, BCR, Bosch, NTT DATA, Vitrina, Numa Film) and the international philanthropic funder Fondation Botnar.

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', and many cohort companies have continued to trade and grow in Cluj-Napoca, which the programme treats as its core retention outcome.

FIX Cluj demonstrates a staged, age-targeted grant model for city-level talent retention, though its retention claim rests on qualitative continuity rather than published survival-rate or employment data.