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
- Entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist Mark Cuban will headline the Global Entrepreneurship Congress, which 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
- The European Investment Bank will invest €70bn ($82bn) into Europe's technology sector by 2027. The initiative seeks to strengthen Europe's position in emerging technologies like AI and military drones and to draw increased private investment, potentially unlocking €250bn for the sector (Innovation Origins)
- France has given crypto entrepreneurs priority access to emergency police services following repeated kidnappings of crypto professionals (Protos)
- The European Commission is creating a new category of "small mid-cap" companies that will be exempted from eight EU laws. Companies with up to 750 employees, and either €150m in turnover or up to €129m in total assets, will be exempted from rules including the General Data Protection Regulation. The new category encompasses 38,000 companies (Politico)
Comment and analysis
- Kazakhstan is betting on code, not commodities (Saahil Menon, contributor, Emerging Europe)
- Turin 2.0: Putting our city at the centre of national competitiveness (Stefano Lo Russo, Mayor of Torino)
- Entrepreneurship must be at the heart of the UK government's new industrial strategy (Dylan Jones-Evans, co-founder, Ideas)
- Government capital is not just 'silly money': State-backed venture capitalism is filling the deep-tech funding gaps in Asia (Raymond Woo, Singapore office representative, Kyoto University Innovation Capital)
- Khaki is the new green: Climate-tech startups pivot to defense (Leah Hodgson, senior reporter, PitchBook)
- We need a better framework for measuring inclusive innovation efforts (Alex Glennie, Glasgow Adam Smith Business School, Adrian Johnston, Innovation City Belfast, and Robyn Klinger-Vidra, King's College London)
Features
- First Austrian state secretary for startups: 'Austria has a lot to offer to international founders' (The Recursive)
- New Politburo resolution like 'downpour after a drought' for Vietnam's private sector (The Investor, Vietnam)
- From Egypt's presidential palace to reviving traditional industries: Osama Wahba's journey from policy to entrepreneurship (MSN)
- How Trump's Gulf trip turned oil kingdoms into tech superpowers (Rest of World)
- U.S. universities are filling a regional innovation gap (MIT Sloan School of Management)
- How Bpifrance transformed French tech in a decade (Sifted - requires free registration)
- Debts held by self-employed people take center stage in election debate (The Korea Times)
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.