New Deep Dive explores how migrant entrepreneurship can drive social inclusion

Migrant entrepreneurship plays a vital role in economic resilience and social inclusion across European cities. Yet support systems often remain fragmented, insufficiently coordinated, linguistically inaccessible, and poorly aligned with the structural realities that migrants face daily.

The Deep Dive report published by the Migration Research to Policy Co-Lab as part of the INNOVATE project and authored MPG’s experts Olivia Long and Alexander Wolffhardt, explores what two cities learned when they moved beyond analysing migrant entrepreneurship and began testing practical solutions.

Titled “Migrant entrepreneurship for social inclusion: Comparative reflections from a parallel programme in two cities”, the report draws on a pilot action carried out in Munich and Turin between 2025 and 2026. Rather than producing another diagnosis of the problem, the process brought local authorities, support organisations, researchers and migrant representatives into the same room to map what already existed, identify where it fell short, and test concrete responses together.

The findings are grounded and unsentimental. Migrant entrepreneurs face real obstacles: difficulty accessing finance, bureaucratic procedures that assume a level of administrative fluency most newcomers don’t yet have, and support services that rarely talk to each other. These aren’t new findings. What is new is the attempt to move beyond documenting them.

What Munich and Turin show is that the answer isn’t more programmes, it’s making existing ones work better together. That requires sustained collaboration, clear ownership of responsibilities, and a willingness to treat migrants not as the subjects of support, but as participants in shaping it.

Read the full Deep Dive to explore the findings and what they mean for cities navigating similar challenges, and explore the three related policy briefs on coordination, access to finance and communication for further insights into how to build more effective and inclusive support systems.