Welcome to ‘The Startup State’ - a weekly bulletin from the GEN Policy and Research team highlighting key entrepreneurship news, reports, commentary and features from around the world.
GEN Atlas insights
The GEN Atlas is the world’s largest entrepreneurship policy compendium, featuring over 350 case studies from 70 countries. This week, our GEN Atlas deep dive examines policies enacted around the world to support ethnic minority entrepreneurs. Read the deep dive
News
- The European Union has reached a political deal on a risk-based framework for regulating artificial intelligence (TechCrunch)
- Estonia’s e-Residency program that allows entrepreneurs around the world to set up and run a location-independent international business has made a cumulative contribution to the state budget of more than €200 million (ERR)
- Germany’s budget crisis has thrown into question whether state subsidies for deep tech and climate tech startups will go ahead as planned. Berlin has frozen payments from its €60bn climate transformation fund, which included €20bn for chipmakers Intel and TCSM following a court ruling that the allocation of funds was illegal (Sifted)
- The Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System has written to banks, fintechs and other payment providers to clamp down on unlicensed financial services companies posing as deposit-taking institutions after fraud concerns have mounted (TechCabal)
- The Island of Jersey has published a ‘Barriers to Business’ report setting out the challenges and limitations when doing business in Jersey and giving 38 recommendations to address them (Government of Jersey)
Publications and analysis
- Is there still a role for direct government support to firms in developing countries?
Should governments in developing countries directly support firms with policies such as grants, subsidized loans, and training and consulting programs, or should they instead just aim to enact sensible regulatory and macroeconomic policies and not attempt to engage in industrial policy? This World Bank paper discusses the rationale and lessons from recent research. - Promoting innovative entrepreneurship in Vietnam: An ecosystem diagnostic
This World Bank report provides a diagnostic of Vietnam’s entrepreneurship ecosystem and details a set of targeted recommendations for improving conditions for innovative entrepreneurship in the country. - Assessing Kenya’s technology innovation ecosystem towards digital entrepreneurship success
This IEEE report presents an empirical assessment of the unique traits that make up Kenya’s digital innovation ecosystem, based on the opinions of 20 digital innovators, industry, government and academia. - 2023 UK equity record
This latest Diversity VC report finds that 71% of UK venture capitalists were privately educated (against 7% of UK population) and that non-white investors were far more likely to have gotten into VC by starting their own fund, among other findings. Read the Sifted summary
Comment
- Startups should have seat at the policy table, not on the menu (Ines Moreno, EU director, Allied for Startups)
- Climate tech is back - and this time, it can’t afford to fail (David Rotman, editor at large, MIT Technology Review)
- How Namibia’s ecosystem can boost its venture capital attractiveness (Ephraim Modise, reporter, TechCabal)
- Two decades of the UNCAC: Forging a united front against corruption (Jodi T Glasow, executive secretary, World Bank Sanctions Board)
- Tackling access to finance for MSMEs in Nigeria: A successful venture into unchartered waters (Sophie Dong, Andrej Popovic, Michael Wong and Michael Fuchs, World Bank)
- We don’t have to choose between ethical AI and innovative AI (Reshma Saujani, founder, Women Who Code and Moms First)
- Finding founder-market-geography fit (Jamie Rodota, writer, Revolution)
- Europe’s deep-tech funding hampered by a lack of understanding (Trevor Clawson, contributor, Forbes)
Features
- Time: 2023 CEO of the year: Sam Altman
- Politico EU: Belgium’s tech bro: Alexander De Croo
- Politico US: Silicon Valley’s AI boom collides with a skeptical Sacramento
- Entrepreneur: The Futurist: H.E. Ohood Al Roumi, UAE Minister of State for Government Development and the Future
To suggest content for inclusion in future editions of 'The Startup State', please email matt@genglobal.org.
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