Every policy idea starts the same way — in a room somewhere, with a problem on a whiteboard and no guarantee it's ever been solved before. For years, that was the quiet failure at the heart of entrepreneurship policy: brilliant minds rebuilding wheels that already existed in Bogotá, Nairobi, or Tallinn, unaware that someone had already tried it, refined it, and learned from it. GEN Atlas was built to eliminate that void — and with the publication of its 500th entry, it just reached a milestone worth stopping to understand.
Entry number 500 belongs to a country whose story has too often been defined by who left rather than who stayed.
Written by Arjan Ymeri, Executive Director of Startup Albania, the case study examines how Albania is turning one of its most persistent challenges — the emigration of talent — into a structural advantage for its startup ecosystem. Ymeri, an experienced ecosystem builder who has served as an advisor on digital transformation for the EU Delegation in Albania and as a key figure in shaping entrepreneurship legislation across the Western Balkans, documents how diaspora engagement is being deliberately woven into the fabric of Albanian startup policy.
The case study explores the mechanisms Albania is deploying to channel diaspora capital, mentorship, and networks back toward domestic founders — not as charity, but as a strategic tool for ecosystem growth. It is a story about sovereignty over one's own talent flow, and about a small country deciding that the size of its ambition does not have to match the size of its population.
That this entry lands as number 500 feels appropriate. It captures everything GEN Atlas is meant to do: take a policy approach tested in a specific place, by a specific practitioner, and make it legible and replicable for everyone else.
How GEN Atlas Works
GEN Atlas is the world's largest compendium of entrepreneurship policy case studies — a free, searchable knowledge portal designed specifically for the people who shape startup ecosystems: policymakers, ecosystem builders, researchers, and advisors.
Each entry follows a consistent structure that enables direct comparison across contexts. Six components anchor every case study: objectives, the policy mechanism itself, cost, policy development process, measurable impact, and lessons learned. This isn't journalism or advocacy — it's a practitioner-grade reference.
The platform organizes its growing library of policy mechanisms around eight thematic pillars that reflect how thriving startup ecosystems actually function:
- Finance: New types of capital for startups and scaleups at the right time.
- Education + Skills: Embedding enterprise and entrepreneurship into education and providing (both existing and potential) entrepreneurs with mentoring, training and support.
- Market Access: Expanding access to markets for startups domestically and abroad.
- Inclusivity + Culture: Ensuring that entrepreneurship is a culturally attractive vocation for all sections of society and in particular that people from disadvantaged groups have an equal opportunity to launch and grow a business.
- Regulation: Removing regulatory barriers to innovation and startup success.
- Ecosystem + Economic Development: Developing and managing local ecosystems to better support entrepreneurs, startups and scale-ups.
- Science, Technology and Innovation: Utilizing the latest advancements in science and technology to improve productivity, boost economic growth and solve societal problems through innovation.
- Policy Making: Maintaining a data-driven, effective and coherent policy-making process that supports entrepreneurs and ensures public awareness of available programs.
GEN has also introduced a four-level evidence rating system that addresses one of the most persistent frustrations in policy work: knowing whether something actually worked. Entries are now transparently rated from basic participation metrics, through outcome achievement, up to broader economic impact assessments — so users can immediately distinguish between "we ran a program" and "we changed an economy."
What GEN Atlas Means For The Global Ecosystem
The world has no shortage of entrepreneurship policy. What it has historically lacked is institutional memory and cross-border translation. GEN Atlas now holds over 500 of these documented experiences, drawn from ecosystems across 100 countries. It underpins major international frameworks: the Youth Business International Youth Entrepreneurship Framework, for instance, tied all 50 of its policy recommendations directly to real-world GEN Atlas entries.
GEN Atlas emerged from GEN's core conviction that the exchange of what actually works, across borders and contexts, is one of the highest-leverage interventions an organization in this space can make. For emerging ecosystems — countries in the early stages of building startup cultures, often with limited policy budgets and small teams — Atlas functions as a shortcut through years of trial and error. It answers the question that every new government programme must first face: Has anyone done this before, and did it work?
We are also at a moment of unusual urgency in the global entrepreneurship policy landscape. Economic instability, geopolitical fragmentation, the acceleration of AI, and deepening inequality have all pushed governments to ask harder questions about how to build resilient, innovative economies — often with fewer resources and less time than the question deserves.
GEN Atlas now offers a direct, structured answer: here are 500 things that were tried, here is the evidence for what they achieved, and here is what the people who built them wish they had known sooner.