Welcome to ‘The Startup State’ - a weekly bulletin from the GEN Policy and Research team highlighting key entrepreneurship announcements, reports, commentary and features from around the world.
News
- Slovenia has adopted a national startup strategy running to 2030, which includes a new legal form for startups, a startup visa, development of the venture capital market, and a solution for exercising stock options (STA announcement | Background)
- Japan is in talks to become the first non-NATO member whose companies are given access to the NATO defense-tech accelerator (Nikkei Asia)
- South Korea has launched a new program to support 757 young founders across 11 startup-centred universities. Firms will receive up 100m Won ($100,000) in commercialization funds and university-specific startup support (Chosun)
- Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, is launching a venture capital fund to invest in up to 150 startups over the next ten years. The city is investing an initial $19m and aims to attract private capital to expand the fund to $190m (TechNode)
- GEN and IDB Lab have launched a two-year initiative to strengthen entrepreneurial ecosystems across Latin America and the Caribbean (GEN)
Research and publications
- From brain drain to brain gain: How governments are turning their diaspora into an entrepreneurship engine
This Global Entrepreneurship Network policy deep dive draws on more than a dozen entries from the GEN Atlas to explore how governments worldwide are mobilizing their diaspora for entrepreneurial growth. - The OECD start-ups database
This OECD working paper introduces a new global micro-level dataset tracking nearly 4.5 million startups founded between 2000 and 2025. - Taking the brakes off UK growth: Building a more dynamic economy for a faster world
This Tony Blair Institute for Global Change report sets out how the UK can restore dynamism and 'stoke the animal spirits needed to drive investment, innovation and growth'.
Comment and analysis
- We must understand startups as central players in the question of sovereignty (Francois Bitouzet, managing director, VivaTech)
- The U.S. thinks of itself as entrepreneurial. But it's slipping (Elizabeth MacBride, senior contributor, Forbes)
- Canada's entrepreneur opportunity (Boris Wertz, founding partner, Version One Wiiners - in French)
- AI summitry: Growth beats safety (Anda Bologa, senior research, Center for European Policy Analysis)
- Why isn't entrepreneurship already at the center of economic development? (Christopher Wink, editor, Technical.ly)
Ecosystem insights
- Sweden's AI startups capture growing U.S. interest (Financial Times)
- AI helping to redefine entrepreneurship across China (China Daily)
- Ukrainian entrepreneurs now account for 12% of all new sole proprietorships in Poland (VisaHQ)
- Madrid opens its doors to Latin American startups focused on artificial intelligence (Contxto)
- Why Japan is pulling out all the stops to create more unicorns (Asia Tech Daily)
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The opinions expressed in the articles above are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the Global Entrepreneurship Network.