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's deep dive examines the key entrepreneurship policies of South Africa. Read the deep dive
News
- Oman has announced a $5.2bn Oman Future Fund that, alongside a primary FDI focus, will allocate 7% towards SMEs and 3% ($156m) towards investment into startups (PR Newswire)
- Nigeria has assembled 120 leading researchers and startups to develop a co-created framework for AI adoption in the country (Narametrics)
- The International Competition Network - a convening of more than 20 competition and consumer protection authorities hosted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission - has published a statement about the importance of tech capacity in enforcement and regulatory agencies (ICN | NextGov summary)
- The Multilateral Development Banks have launched a joint tool to assess countries’ electronic government procurement systems (African Development Bank)
South Korea is considering measures to boost research and development by lowering the fees that companies must pay when developing new technologies with government funding (Pulse News)
Publications & analysis
- Financial health for young entrepreneurs: Our findings
This Youth Business International learning paper sets out an evidence-informed approach that can systematically improve how young entrepreneurs can be supported to access appropriate financial services and products. - Enterprising women: A decade of learning from Ethiopia’s Women Entrepreneurship Development Project
This World Bank report highlights key results from impact evaluations of WEDP - a program that started in 2012 and expanded to operate across 18 Ethiopian cities, registering 60,000 women entrepreneurs, providing more than 25,000 business loans, and training 30,000 women. - What works in supporting women-led businesses?
This World Bank report reviews evidence on interventions designed to support women-led businesses, focusing on a substantial body of high-quality randomized control trials primarily conducted with SMEs in low- or middle-income countries. - Sharing the entrepreneurial wealth
This CEPR column by Josh Lerner (Harvard Business School), Junxi Liu (University of Warwick), and Jacob Moscona and David Y. Yang (Harvard University) examines the impact of the increase in venture capitalism funnelled towards Chinese firms. The authors find that the rise of a new hub for innovation and entrepreneurship can have large global benefits by broadening the focus of technology, and hence who benefits from it.
Comment
- Another day, another tortured economic development policy (David Burt, director of entrepreneurship, University of New South Wales writing in defence of the under-fire Breakthrough Victoria)
- Digital trade protocol for Africa: Why it matters, what’s in it and what’s still missing (Franziska Sucker, associate professor, University of the Witwatersrand)
- Spring cleaning for entrepreneurial ecosystem developers (Rob Williams, director, SourceLink)
- Broadband, the ACP, and an equitable startup ecosystem (Engine)
- Why place – real, physical space – still matters for innovation (Christopher Wink, co-founder and CEO, Technical.ly)
Features
- Financial Times: ‘Resilience’ of Belgian economy supports local startups
- Sifted: The maturation of Munich
- MIT Technology Review: How ASML took over the chipmaking chessboard
- GEN Australia: A map of Australian annual innovation and impact events
A detailed mapping of Australian innovation and impact events, collated by GEN Australia MD Chad Renando.
To suggest content for inclusion in future editions of 'The Startup State', please email matt@genglobal.org.
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