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
Entrepreneurship World Cup: There are just days left to join the 2025 Entrepreneurship World Cup experience. Entrepreneurs are taking a shot at 'the Cup' for a chance to win:
- A share of $1.5m in equity-free cash prizes;
- An expenses-paid trip to pitch live to investors at the Entrepreneurship World Cup Global Finals in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia;
- An opportunity to showcase bold solutions at Biban 2025, Saudi Arabia's global SME and entrepreneurship forum;
- In-person training sessions with mentors and networking with investors
- Access to a virtual bootcamp that includes training and 1-1 mentorship for the top 250 global applicants;
- PLUS: Every application will gain access to more than $3m of FounderPass perks, just for applying.
Research and publications
- The future of entrepreneurial ecosystems research: Toward a policy-oriented research agenda
This 12-author paper summarizes discussions among 58 experts at the EE Research Spring School in 2024, covering policy adoption in the context of entrepreneurship education, challenges and evolution of research methods, and a proposed future policy-oriented research agenda. - Benchmarking government support for venture capital
This OECD report presents recent trends in VC markets and compares the approaches to government VC policies across 9 OECD countries.
Comment and analysis
- The price of admission for Canadian entrepreneurs (Douglas Soltys, editor-in-chief, BetaKit launches the inaugural BetaKit Most Ambitious, an annual edition telling stories of bold ambition in Canadian tech)
- Missing links in the (Nepalese) startup ecosystem (Roshee Lamichhane, assistant professor, Kathmandu University School of Management)
- Entrepreneurship can build a better tomorrow (Gim Huay Neo, managing director and chair of Greater China, World Economic Forum)
- Africa’s deep tech centers (Nima Sanandaji, director, European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform launches the ECEPR 2025 Deep Tech Index)
- How emotions rule every stage of the entrepreneurial process (Florencio Portocarrero, assistant professor of management, London School of Economics and Political Science)
- How Switzerland transformed itself into a deep tech leader (David Prosser, contributor, Forbes)
- Station F: What is the assessment 8 years after the opening of the campus initiated by Xavier Niel? (Maxence Fabrion, journalist, Maddyness - in French)
- Why we need to build support systems for founders everywhere (Verena Kuhn, head, innovator communities, World Economic Forum)
Features
- Why tech startups should choose Riyadh as their MENA launchpad (Arab News)
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.