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
- The Global Entrepreneurship Network and Alibaba.com have joined forces to open applications for CoCreate Pitch, the world's leading product-driven startup competition. Learn more | Apply now | View the digital media toolkit and create co-branded promotional graphics
News
- China has drafted new rules to guide and evaluate government investment funds, aiming to better leverage their role in serving national strategies, boosting industrial upgrading, and fostering innovation and entrepreneurship (CN News)
- The Israel Innovation Authority has launched a nationwide competitive process to establish up to three new deep-tech incubators. The initiative offers up to $10.8m per incubator over five years (YNet)
- Saudi young entrepreneurs are responsible for 38% of all businesses, totalling over 474,000, with app development, AI, and e-gaming the fastest-growing sectors (FastCompany)
- Cape Verde has launched the National Startups and Digital Acceleration Program, known as BOOST.CV. The initiative is a key part of the government's Digital Nation strategy and is designed to support and empower young entrepreneurs in the country and its diaspora (Tech African News)
- Iraq has moved closer to a National SME Policy. The Ministry of Planning, in partnership with the International Labour Organization and the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation, hosted a national validation workshop in Baghdad to review and endorse the first draft (ReliefWeb)
- Kenya has thrown its weight behind a new push to transform the country's universities into hubs of innovation and commercialization. The Kenyan National Innovation Agency convened vice chancellors for a high-level Entrepreneurial Leaders' Training Program, as part of the Entrepreneurial Institutions Maturity Framework, which aims to embed commercialization and entrepreneurship at the core of Kenya's higher education system (CIO Africa)
- The Indian state of Maharashtra has published its Startup, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy 2025, which aims to create 50,000 startups in the next five years. The state has the highest number of startups in the country, recording 29,146, 18% of the total across India (Times of India)
Research and publications
- Strengthening science, technology and innovation parks in national innovation ecosystems of developing countries (UNCTAD)
- Preparing to seize artificial intelligence opportunities with strategic national policies (UNCTAD)
- Innovation policy: The new core of economic strategy (GIS)
Why entrepreneurial capabilities are key to empowering MENA's youth (PWC)
Comment and analysis
- Establishing a premier digital hub in Central Asia (Sherzod Shermatov, minister of digital technologies, Uzbekistan)
- Measuring what matters for the business: The new B-READY data in the World Development Indicators (Aana Florina Pirlea and Tiffany Ronpeng Yang, World Bank)
- Stop funding accelerators. Invest in venture studios instead (Paul O'Brien, author, Startup Economist)
- How visibility is fueling the rise of female founders (Philip Salter, founder, The Entrepreneurs Network)
- Towards a smarter startup financing policy: Strengthening the backbone of Bangladesh's innovation economy (Kimiwa Saddat, managing director (current charge), Community Bank PLC)
- Europe doesn't have a startup problem, it has a storytelling problem (Steph Bailey, Sifted - requires free registration)
Features
- They left Syria as refugees. They're returning to build its tech industry (Rest of World)
- Act now or fall behind: Scott Farquhar's five-point AI plan for Australia (Forbes)
- Encouraging international innovation starts with Vietnam (Cosmos)
- From loans to losses: Kashmir's entrepreneurial dream ending in debt traps (Greater Kashmir)
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.
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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.