In his annual Global Entrepreneurship Week address, GEN president Jonathan Ortmans shares a look at the week ahead.
Welcome to Global Entrepreneurship Week 2022, where through national campaigns, 200 nations are united behind a global mission: to encourage more of their citizens to consider the path of entrepreneurship.
I would like to thank all of our hosts, global partners, and local organizers around the world who will inspire more than 10 million people to transform their world.
The world needs more entrepreneurs. We need more of our citizens rethinking, ideating, creating jobs and generating new value for their economies, their communities and themselves.
When we conceived Global Entrepreneurship Week 15 years ago with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, we had a simple goal. We wanted to show all citizens and all nations that Silicon Valley has no monopoly on entrepreneurship.
We set out to inspire and give confidence to all citizens, but especially to historically underrepresented groups so they too knew they could be dreamers, doers, and risk-takers.
The time has never been more important for each of us to call on more of our nation’s entrepreneurial potential.
Entrepreneurs are more than optimists. They are natural leaders made for uncertain times and big problems like the ones we face today.
Many of us are anxious about our health, inflation, how to pay our bills, the polarization of our world and of course, the sustainability of our planet due to climate change.
But put simply, many of us are uncomfortable or even scared of this less certain and less predictable world.
The good news is that entrepreneurs thrive on both problems and uncertainty. They see possibilities. As change accelerates, they see an infinite number of new potential solutions to test. They inspire us all to be curious, to be resilient and confident in humanity and our ability to solve problems.
Data shows that in the post-pandemic world, millions of new actions are happening very fast across national boundaries that are, of course, porous to innovation and ideas. While the rules and norms have changed, the early adapters, the entrepreneurs, are already on it. We can have that confidence. But we need more of them.
So, this week, organized under four pillars: entrepreneurship education, ecosystems, policy and inclusion, enablers of all kinds are trying to inspire more of us to become that next generation of dreamers and builders.
GEW will offer inspiring talks, forums, networking events, hackathons and award ceremonies. It also offers dozens of pitch competitions anchored by our Entrepreneurship World Cup, where we’ll have national competitions and applications from nearly two hundred countries.
There will be events from all over the world, from Alaska to Auckland, hosted by thousands of partners and leaders who are all listening, learning and hopefully inspiring more of us to take action.
And while philanthropic leaders like the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in the United States are at its heart, during GEW you will hear from corporations like FedEX, heads of state like South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who is joining me shortly at our 22 on Sloane Campus for a hackathon and award ceremony in Johannesburg.
There will be thousands of entrepreneurial support organizations, investors, community leaders and of course, entrepreneurs themselves. We’ll also have lots of news and announcements.
We just announced the opening of our latest GEN campus in Turkey. There will also be announcements for example, in the United States about new programs. We’ll also have lots of news on upcoming events including a summit in Kansas City.
We’ll have hundreds of live events and tons of virtual activities.
I will be hosting several leaders on my podcast throughout the week. We will have stories from the early days of GEW as well as stories from ministers, entrepreneurs and in fact, at least one of our global partners that has been with us since day one of Global Entrepreneurship Week, who I’m very proud to say was just nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
For all of you who wish to get together live and in person, we will also be opening registration for the next Global Entrepreneurship Congress, taking place in Melbourne, Australia on May 1 – 4. Go to GEC.co to sign up. That will be an opportunity to connect in person with more of the people who are celebrating this week.
We are united around a common value proposition. How do we inspire more people to become bigger than the sum of their parts? How do we inspire more historically underrepresented entrepreneurial ecosystems and communities to join this exciting world where we reboot, rethink and regenerate to transform our world?
We aspire to light candles in more of the hearts and minds of young people and people who previously felt left out of our ecosystems. We hope to level the playing field and make it possible for anyone, anywhere to start, or scale a firm.
My thanks to all our team at GEN Global who have worked around the clock on this. I also want to thank all of our national host organizations in each country, and the thousands of volunteer organizers who across the world have donated their time and talent engaging their communities.
Thank you and have a great Global Entrepreneurship Week.