Held during the middle of Global Entrepreneurship Week, Web Summit is an annual technology conference hosted in Lisbon. Built around the topics of emerging technologies and venture capital, the conference explores the future of the global tech industry and brings together over 70,000 people including policymakers, heads of states, CEOs and some of the world’s leading thinkers shaping the technologies of the future. The discussions at web summit have fingers on pulse of some of the most intriguing debates within the sector, with keynote speakers such as Katherine Maher and Jimmy Wales and panel discussions on subjects ranging from AI regulation to the art of storytelling.
Held in conjunction with Web Summit was the Startup Genome Ecosystem Leadership Forum. This event gathered high-profile innovation policy executives and ecosystem leaders for structurer work sessions that addressed several of the key challenges facing ecosystem builders including; activating underutilized talent groups, solving seed funding gaps, creating a scaleup ecosystem, ecosystem data problems and solutions, cleantech, deeptech, and talent retention & attraction.
The event also included several short presentations on state of scaleup ecosystems and the journey required for startups to scale rapidly from JF Gauthier, Founder and CEO of Startup Genome and Yoram Wijngaarde, CEO of Dealroom. These presentations highlighted many of the findings from the Scaleup Report launched by Startup Genome in collaboration with the Global Entrepreneurship Network.
Likewise, a new national entrepreneurship index was announced as a collaborative project with partners including GEN. This project will allow policymakers to compare and contrast national ecosystems across the world building on previous work establishing an index of city-level ecosystems. This project is in partnership with the G20 presidency held by Brazil next year. Any countries interested in showcasing the progress their national ecosystems have made should get in touch with the team to collaborate on this further.