In an article dedicated to Neelie Kroes, special envoy for startups at StartUpDelta and former European Commission vice-president for the digital agenda, Forbes quotes research results from The 2016 Startup Nation Scoreboard and the European Digital Cities Index, two flagship research projects by the European Digital Forum. It writes, “Since January 2015, under Kroes’s leadership and vast network, along with the efforts of Director Sigrid Johannisse and her team, StartUpDelta’s first phase catapulted the Netherlands onto center stage, going from nowhere (literally) to no. 4 in the EU according to Compass (2015), no. 1 on the Startup Nations Scoreboard, no. 1 and no. 2 for both startups and scale-ups on the Digital Cities Index, and becoming the fifth fastest-growing ecosystem in the world.”