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 community news
- Global Entrepreneurship Congress returns to the U.S. for the first time in 15 years this summer. Join thousands of founders, investors, ecosystem builders and policymakers from 200 countries in Indianapolis, June 2-5 (GEN)
News
- India has announced a new $1.15 billion fund of funds for startups while unveiling sweeping regulatory reforms and an ambitious nuclear energy program, as it seeks to boost tech innovation and clean energy (TechCrunch)
- Enterprise Singapore's investment arm, Seeds Capital, has set aside $150 million over the next three years to invest in innovative Singapore-based deep-tech startups (The Business Times)
- Indonesia has launched a nationwide entrepreneurship training program targeting 10,000 MSMEs within the next three months (Antara News)
- The European Union can now ban AI systems they deem to pose “unacceptable risk” after the first compliance deadline of the EU AI Act. Unacceptable activities include social scoring, manipulation of a person’s decisions, using biometrics to infer characteristics, and creation or expansion of facial recognition databases through scraping security cameras (TechCrunch)
- South Korea has launched its latest “K-Startup” government-wide startup competition with ten government ministries. Launched in 2016, the startup competition is now the largest in the country with over 6,000 teams participating last year (Chosun Biz)
Research and publications
- How leaders in the global south can devise AI regulation that enables innovation
This Tony Blair Institute report highlights AI’s vast economic potential and the need for strategic governance. It urges governments, especially in the Global South, to balance innovation with regulation using a five-step framework and the ‘AI Regulation Wheel’. - AI and creative technology scaleups: Less talk, more action
This UK House of Lords report warns that the UK risks becoming “an incubator economy”, risking economic decline and a brain drain unless it does a better job supporting UK AI and creative tech startups to grow into global competitors. It calls for streamlined innovation support, financial reforms, AI investment, and long-term backing for creative industries. WiredGov summary
Comment and analysis
- The startup scorecard: How governments can unlock trillions in innovation and economic growth (Paul O’Brien, publisher, Startup Economist analyzes the Startup Genome & GEN APEXE Nations Report methodology)
- German tech at a crossroads: What the next government must get right (Jan Lozek, managing director and founder, Future Energy Ventures)
- Tariff threat is “wake-up call” to increase domestic support for Canadian startups (Stephen Hurford, reporter, Global Corporate Venturing)
- France finally has a budget. What does it mean for startups? (Daphne Leprince-Ringuet, senior reporter, Sifted)
- Is Europe’s Competitiveness Compass leading it astray? Padraig Nolan, COO, ETPPA and non-resident fellow, Center for European Policy Analysis)
- French tech: Still the “French touch” of innovation (Marion Trommenschlager, researcher, University of Rennes - in French)
- What makes Sweden’s technology ecosystem such an innovation powerhouse? (Omid Ekhlasi, CEO & founder, Techarena)
Features
- Inside France’s effort to shape the global AI conversation (Time)
- Inside the French founders factory churning out AI startups like Mistral and
- Hugging Face: ‘There are swarms of them’ (Sifted)
- Britain goes soft on AI after Trump’s bonfire of rules (Politico EU)
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
Get updates delivered directly to your inbox
Subscribe by selecting 'The Startup State' under communications permission in the form below.
The opinions expressed in the articles above are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the Global Entrepreneurship Network.