A Message from Global Entrepreneurship Week co-founder and GEN president Jonathan Ortmans (Video Transcript):
Welcome to Global Entrepreneurship Week 2024.
I'm Jonathan Ortmans, and this is the 17th year since we founded this great global campaign to empower more citizens around the world to consider the path of entrepreneurship.
Whether you are new to this field or whether you are one of the experienced builders and backers in one of our communities across the globe, you are now part of a movement.
A movement that believes that we can solve problems.
A movement in 200 countries that this week will attract over 10 million people to over 40,000 events.
It's a very important campaign because it focuses on what we can create and build and do at a time when there are so many challenges for our world.
We hope you will see this as an opportunity to be part of creating something new, building something better, and figuring out new ways of doing things with your fellow citizens.
We believe that entrepreneurship is for everyone. In fact, that's our tagline and theme this year.
This theme builds on the notion that we believe that entrepreneurship can happen anywhere, which is where we began this campaign trying to convince the world that Silicon Valley didn't have a monopoly on this.
Entrepreneurship can happen in any community and it could happen to anyone.
This week you will see a lot happening.
I have the great privilege of speaking at the COP29 conference on the role that founders and startups have in coming up with solutions that can be implemented towards some of our climate goals, whether they are green tech or clean tech advocates, or whether they're simply looking at new solutions that will help execute what our government leaders feel is important to save our planet.
In another part of the world in South America and Rio de Janeiro, we will be releasing our new G20 entrepreneurship report with Startup Genome which will take a look at what are the latest trends and what are the latest developments happening in the major economies around the world within the global entrepreneurial ecosystem.
I will also be in South Africa, where we will open our latest GEN Campus, the 22 on Sloane hub in Cape Town.
This is an opportunity for us to show globally what can happen in a community that rallies around effective tactical strategies to enable more of its entrepreneurs to succeed in their journey towards self-resilience and finding opportunities and turning them into reality.
We will have various members of the GEN team in other parts of the world. In Europe, we have three members participating with governments. There's also the Web Summit that happened in Portugal.
And perhaps most importantly, I'm very excited to say entrepreneurship will be celebrated in small, left-behind communities across the United States.
We're always so proud of the great campaigns that happen in Kansas City, the home of the Kauffman Foundation, which is the leader behind this movement, who developed the idea and has supported it from its outset.
And, we've been joined along the way by many companies like FedEx, that recognizes the importance of empowering several communities and demographic groups that have been left out of this equation in the past.
I hope you'll participate wherever you are in the world, that you're enjoying this week, and that you will take a look at what's happening, whether on the research side or finding out what's happening in a community different from your own.
But I also hope that if you get excited about this world and you're keen to think about how to take the next step, we are very pleased to announce that for the first time in many years, the Global Entrepreneurship Congress will be returning to the United States.
It'll be held in Indianapolis, Indiana, the first week of June 2025. If you are planning a trip to the United States in 2025, please plan it around that time. Come and join us. Come meet many of the leaders of the ecosystems across the world.
We will have thousands of representatives, both leaders, investors, as well as, of course, the founders and the entrepreneurs and small businesses that are being enabled by this great movement.
We will all gather in Indianapolis for a week. It's a great chance for you to make new friends, to create opportunities, and to walk away empowered with the understanding that actually, this is a genuinely global movement in every nation, despite the fact that on the front pages of our newspapers, we see evidence of divisions among our nations and certainly among our geopolitical leaders.
So if you're looking for a positive outlook for the future, and you're thinking that you'd like to do a face-to-face connection, I hope that during Global Entrepreneurship Week, you will think about whether you can find a way to make it to the United States. You can go to GEC.CO to register. But in the meantime, enjoy Global Entrepreneurship Week and everything your community has to offer.
I also want to thank you for giving this your thought, your time, and your energy as we all work together to figure out better ways of doing things and we embark upon what is a profound mission: to find ways that we can improve not just our lives, but those of our fellow citizens around us.
Happy Global Entrepreneurship Week.