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.
News
- The United Kingdom has published an ‘AI opportunities action plan’ that seeks to “unleash AI across the UK to deliver a decade of national renewal”. The plan includes forging new AI ‘growth zones’, increasing public compute capacity twentyfold, creating a national data library, and creating an AI energy council (gov.uk)
- Taiwan has opened a startup hub in Silicon Valley to connect Taiwan’s startups to the world. The hub is part of a wider $4.5 billion plan to accelerate the development of Taiwan’s startup ecosystem over the next four years (PR Newswire)
- Indian startups raised over $147 billion and created over 1.6 million jobs between 2016 and 2024, according to the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade. The removal of a tax on angel investment last year was credited with strengthening the startup ecosystem (DeccanHerald)
Publications and research
- Estimating the number of firms in Africa
This World Bank paper uses a novel methodology combining multiple data sources to estimate the number of firms in Africa. The results suggest that by 2020 there were 12.7 million firms with more than one worker, about 240 million own-account businesses, and 218 million own-account informal businesses. - 2024 Round-up: A detailed look at start-up funding in Africa
This ‘Africa: The Big Deal’ presentation examines 3,500 deals worth $19 billion to provide a detailed analysis of the state of African startup investment in 2024. - OpenAI’s economic blueprint
This OpenAI paper outlines policy proposals for how the US can maximize AI’s benefits, bolster national security, and drive economic growth.
Comment and analysis
- To restore global growth, ease barriers for entrepreneurs (Kristalina Georgieva, managing director, International Monetary Fund)
- Your state needs an office of entrepreneurship (Jason Grill, chief government affairs officer, Right to Start)
- The new AI action plan offers the UK a way to get back on track (Tony Blair, former prime minister and William Hague, former leader of the Conservative Party)
- Building cities out of song: The creative engine of entrepreneurship and innovation (Paul O’Brien, CEO, MediaTech Ventures)
- With a possible end to the war in sight, will 2025 bring a startup ‘baby boom’? (Saron Wrobel, tech reporter, Times of Israel)
- Learning to unlock potential: Getting the first pilot up and running (Nyangala Zohlo and Wanda Maria Mollica, Innovation Growth Lab)
- How Michigan is trying to recapture its innovation mojo (Rick Haglund, columnist, Michigan Advance)
- An outline for North Carolina’s incoming secretary of technology (Steve Rao, columnist, WRAL News)
Features
- Can the Gulf states become tech superpowers? (Economist - requires free account)
- Top 10 African tech and business podcasts you should check out in 2025 (TechCabal)
GEN Atlas insights
The GEN Atlas is the world’s largest entrepreneurship policy compendium, featuring over 400 case studies from 70 countries. Using these case studies, we publish Country Deep Dives examining the policies underpinning countries’ entrepreneurial success, Policy Deep Dives comparing different countries’ approaches to common policy challenges, and Atlas Spotlights highlighting the best examples of policies under a broad theme. Recent highlights:
- Policy deep dives: Employee share schemes | Startup visas | Youth entrepreneurship | Supporting ethnic minority entrepreneurs
- Country deep dives: South Africa | France | The Netherlands | Australia | Spain
- Atlas spotlights: Finance
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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.