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. Our latest entry to be updated examines Germany’s Better Regulation Program - a wide-reaching initiative to reduce red tape, simplify regulations, and improve the overall quality of policymaking. Read the Atlas entry
News
- The UNDP, the presidents of Rwanda and Ghana, and Nigeria’s digital economy minister Bosun Tijani used Davos to launch ‘Timbuktoo’, an ambitious pan-African development initiative with the aim to mobilize $1bn capital to create 10 million jobs and transform 100 million lives. It will include legislative reform, derisking investment, and ‘university innovation pods’, among other efforts to strengthen African entrepreneurship ecosystems (UNDP)
- Saudi Arabia has boosted its Aramco Ventures unit by $4bn, more than doubling the state oil company’s overall venture capital funds (Aramco)
- The United Kingdom’s technology secretary Michelle Donelan has announced a government “scaleup policy sprint” with the aim of matching US levels of VC investment as a share of GDP by 2030 - which would mean an additional £5bn ($6.3bn) per year into British startups (Sifted | Speech transcript)
- Nigeria’s minister of women affairs and social affairs Uju Kenedy-Ohaneye has launched a new unit in the SME Development Agency of Nigeria dedicated to supporting women and youth entrepreneurship (Blueprint)
Publications and analysis
- The effects of matching grants on technology startups: The case of Korea’s TIPS
This World Bank report examines ten years of data behind a public-private matching grant program to answer the question of whether public funding can help startups innovate and subsequently improve their performance. - Reset and revitalise: UK-Africa trade and investment
This Tony Blair Institute for Global Change report sets out how the UK can reset its historically aid-focused African engagement approach to embrace emerging economic opportunities and achieve mutual prosperity and cooperation.
- The state of social enterprise 2024
This World Economic Forum and Schwab Foundation Global Alliance for Social Entrepreneurship report is the first, comprehensive global dataset to estimate the size and scope of social enterprise worldwide. It finds 10 million social enterprises globally, with $2 trillion annual revenue and 200 million jobs. - The future of growth report 2024
This World Economic Forum report introduces a multidimensional framework to assess the quality of growth across 107 countries globally. It characterizes nations’ economic growth across four dimensions: innovativeness; inclusiveness; sustainability; and resilience. - The future of global fintech: Towards resilient and inclusive growth
This World Economic Forum and Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance report reveals new data on the rapidly evolving fintech ecosystem and the opportunities fintech activities are offering traditionally underserved consumers and businesses.
Comment
- The <U.S.> military’s insistence on owning commercial intellectual property is limiting innovation (Shyam Sankar, CTO, Palantir Technologies, Caitlin Dohrman, CEO, Tangram Flex, and Madeline Zimmerman, department of defense deployment strategist, Palantir Technologies)
- Homegrown African VCs emerge to fill in the gaps foreign investors cannot (Annie Njanja, contributor, TechCrunch)
- How a pioneering microfinance initiative is boosting Indonesia’s women entrepreneurs (Sunarso, CEO, PT Bank Rakyat Indonesia)
- Why the federal government’s plan to increase the sophisticated investor threshold is terrible news for Australia’s startups (Cheryl Mack, CEO, Aussie Angels)
- Israel needs to formulate a cross-ministerial strategy to assist the tech sector (Liron Rose, serial entrepreneur and author, ‘Entrepreneurship and investments at eye level’)
- How to rewire economic growth for a new era (Saadia Zahidi, managing director, World Economic Forum)
- The most creative entrepreneurs are in prison (John L Orr, prisoner and contributor, Prison Journalism Project)
- How the pandemic rebooted entrepreneurship in the U.S. (Kenan Fikri, director of research and Daniel Newman, research and policy analyst, Economic Innovation Group)
Features
- TechCrunch: Taiwan’s president-elect faces growing challenges with its chip industry
- Fast Company: How America became obsessed with the idea of working for oneself
Excerpt from ‘One day I’ll work for myself: The dream and delusion that conquered America’ by business historian Benjamin C. Waterhouse. - Babson: What entrepreneurship can mean for those in prison
To suggest content for inclusion in future editions of 'The Startup State', please email matt@genglobal.org.
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