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.
GET Fellows
The Global Entrepreneurship Network and IDB Lab, the innovation and venture arm of the Inter-American Development Bank, have opened applications for the inaugural GET Fellows cohort, a new program to strengthen entrepreneurship ecosystem leadership across Latin America and the Caribbean.
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News
- Indonesia has launched the Digital Ecosystem Alignment (DEAL) initiative, bringing together agencies, businesses, academics, investors, startups, and communities to accelerate the country's digital transformation (Antara)
- Ghana has announced plans for a government-backed innovation fund to provide patient capital for startups and attract venture investment into the country. The initiative forms part of Ghana's newly launched National AI Strategy (Modern Ghana)
- Egypt has launched the Startup Egypt platform to connect founders with investors, support organizations, and government. The platform builds on the Startup Charter introduced earlier this year, with the goal of supporting 5,000 startups and generating 500,000 direct and indirect jobs (CairoScene)
- Vietnam has proposed a $100m national venture capital fund modelled on Israel's Yozma program (TechNode)
- Israel has announced a package of support to help startups and the wider tech sector cope with a strong shekel. The currency recently reached a 33-year high and has risen 20% against the US Dollar in the last year (Times of Israel)
- Nepal has unveiled a plan to ease regulatory hurdles, simplify compliance requirements, and improve access to services and subsidized loans for startups. Central to the plan is to allow startups to file taxes annually rather than quarterly (Kathmandu Post)
- Australia has unveiled carve-outs for startups from capital gains tax reforms after Tech Council CEO Kate Cornick warned Australia "risks becoming an outlier". However, despite the carve-out, founders have warned of a talent exodus (ABC)
Research and publications
- Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2026 (Startup Genome and Global Entrepreneurship Network)
- Incubation in Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: Hatching growth (OECD Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs, Regions and Cities)
- The Foundations of an Innovation Flywheel: How emerging startup ecosystems are building from scratch (Engine)
- Powerlist 2026: Corporate venture leaders shaping the future of the industry (Global Corporate Venturing)
Comment and analysis
- Speech to Vivatech 2026 (Narendi Modi, prime minister of India)
- America was built by entrepreneurs. Here's how we keep that edge for the next 250 years (Steve Case)
- The local launchpad: Why incubators and accelerators matter (Pablo Shah, junior policy analyst, OECD)
- Vietnam's bid to become a startup nation (Benjamin Cabanes, Thu Nguyen, Trang Le, and Cherry Sriratanaviriyakul, RMIT Vietnam)
- Tech Hubs Baltimore: A loss that still stings (Mark Anthony Thomas, president and CEO, Greater Baltimore Committee)
- Louisiana just did something no other <U.S.> state has had the guts to do: It clarified "entrepreneur" (Paul O'Brien, author, Startup Economist)
- Echoes from the future: The missing pieces in Cyprus's emerging tech ecosystem (Demetrios Zoppos, partner, 33East)
- Asia does not have an innovation problem; It has an innovation transfer problem (Sebastian Tai Jian Haw, contributor, TNGlobal)
- Why Switzerland thinks it can be deep tech capital of the world (David Prosser, contributor, Forbes)
- Norrsken House Brussels and the politics of building a regenerative economy (Christopher Marquis, author, Regenerative Insights)
Features
- Joshua Baer, godfather of Austin's startup scene, dies in plane crash (BizJournals)
- The fintech landscape of Central America: Guatemala in 2026 (The Fintech Times)
- America 250: Land of opportunity and entrepreneurship (Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council)
- Pitch decks vs prospectuses: The messy courtship of Africa's tech scene and old-money bourses (LaunchBaseAfrica)
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The opinions expressed in the articles above are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Global Entrepreneurship Network.