The first day of the Global Entrepreneurship Congress kicked off at the Politecnico di Milano, the largest technical university in Italy, with GEW country hosts and representatives from partner organizations gathered for the GEW Annual Meeting.
While the GEC opening ceremony is not until Tuesday morning, the Annual Meeting is an opportunity for hosts to get a head start on the week by connecting with fellow hosts and leveraging each other’s strengths to bolster their own campaigns.
Jonathan Ortmans, Chair of the Global Entrepreneurship Congress, opened the day’s sessions by unveiling the Global Entrepreneurship Network, a year round platform of programs and initiatives created by the communities that celebrate Global Entrepreneurship Week.
GEN’s programs are divided into five categories: Celebrate, Connect, Compete, Understand and Support.
Celebrate is a global celebration of entrepreneurship and is primarily Global Entrepreneurship Week and its theme days.
Connect includes events like the Global Entrepreneurship Congress that bring together players from throughout the ecosystem.
Compete programs are global pick competitions that help highlight innovative founders from around the world. Rasmus Wiinstedt Tscherning of the Creative Business Cup, Michalis Stangos of Future Agro Challenge and Donna Harris of ChallengeX were among the startup competition founders to present their global competitions, highlighting reasons that hosts should consider encouraging startups in their countries to participate.
Understand encompasses GEN’s research and policy programs, which include the Global Entrepreneurship Index, Startup Nations, the Global Entrepreneurship Research Network and the Compass Report.
The Support aspect of GEN is the programs and resources that help entrepreneurs at various stages of the startup process. This includes Startup Experience, a hands-on training program that helps high school and college students build new ventures and the Global Enterprise Registration, an online system that lists online business registration systems by country, in an effort to provide entrepreneurs worldwide with a one-stop-shop for online registration and information regarding business registration processes.
In the afternoon, delegates heard from Suren Dutia from the Kauffman Foundation, who advised hosts on the importance of building an effective GEN Nation Board of Directors. Additionally, Global Entrepreneurship Week impact stories were shared from around the world, including the #handshakeselfie campaign that took the United Kingdom by storm, GEW Algeria’s impressive growth from 20 events four years ago to over 2 thousand events in 2014 and the inaugural GEN Magazine launch with Richard Branson on the cover.
While the GEW Annual Meeting was taking place in the main auditorium, the Global Entrepreneurship Research Network (GERN) held its own Annual Meeting to examine fundamental questions about fostering entrepreneurship, share research findings, and develop new joint research initiatives. The group was founded in October 2013 to address the need for better entrepreneurship research, more standardized sources of data, greater collaboration among research supporters, and to promote new studies of entrepreneurship dynamics around the world. Since then, it has driven collaborative efforts among its members to further research in the field, as in the case of the ecosystem-mapping project Endeavor Insight and MarS have spearheaded.
This year’s GERN Annual Meeting focused on developing studies that result in evidence-based tools for governments and program leaders so that may better able help entrepreneurs succeed. The lightening talk portion of the meeting allowed members to share the research work they are doing and find commonalities between each other’s efforts. For example, Thomas Funke, head of entrepreneurship for RKW Kompetenzzentrum, the official host organization for GEW Germany, shared a policy analysis framework that can be used by researchers who seek to address the ever-increasing demand for findings that can be applied by policy makers and programs directors alike. On the same subject, the OECD’s Mariarosa Lunati who leads its entrepreneurship, productivity and micro data section, discussed developing a set of indicators that policymakers can use to track progress on ecosystem support.
The Global Entrepreneurship Congress continues tomorrow at the MiCo – Milano Congresso with the Start + Scale Forum. Come out early to see the official Congress opening ceremony directly before the Forum.