The Global Entrepreneurship Congress is an opportunity to delve into various topics relating to healthy entrepreneurial ecosystems through a variety of summits and forums.
This year, the GEC will have a special focus on innovative approaches to strengthening local ecosystems. Diverse in size, demographics, location, assets and governance structures, cities are a perfect place to test policy innovations that can spur entrepreneurship-driven resilience and economic growth.
Start + Scale Forum
This all-day session is focused on efforts to start and scale new and young firms around the world. It is the primary focal point of the GEC for all audience types. The keynote of the Cities discussion will be given by Mayor Giuliano Pisapia of Milan, followed by a representative of the City of Medellin and the winner of the GEC Cities Challenge.
Successful entrepreneurs will share their personal journeys including Amy Cosper, vice-president and editor in chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, Jeff Hoffman, co-founder of Priceline.com and Colorjar, and Rebeca Hwang, founder of Rivet Ventures.
Also speaking at the Summit are the teams behind two startups that won global picks during Global Entrepreneurship Week last fall. Denny Hollick and Shan Shan Fu, co-founders of ConceptKicker, won the Global Startup Battle and Ziv Lautman, CMO of Breezometer, won Startup Open.
Research + Policy Summit
Most startups do not have the time or resources to pay close attention to public policy, but government decisions affect their decisions all along the new business idea lifecycle. For this purpose, experts in entrepreneurship education like CEO of CoderDojo Mary Moloney, for example, will shed light on new dimensions of entrepreneurship education. On another area intersecting entrepreneurship, Felipe Hoffa, developer advocate at Google Cloud will make the case for: "the power of open data to help build entrepreneurial cities”. Examples of companies built around the public datasets will also be shared. “If we use the right technology we can make big data simple, approachable, and instantly usable by citizens, government, and industry, including entrepreneurs,” Hoffa has expressed.
Be ready for many other disruptive ideas. The Research + Policy Summit will feature 12-minute pitches by experts in various policy areas intersecting with entrepreneurship, such as crowdfunding and sharing economy and will offer specific policy ideas for the audience of policymakers to see through which are most relevant in their ecosystems.
Other speakers include Dane Stangler, vice president for Research & Policy at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Usman Ahmed, policy counsel for eBay, and Zoltan Acs, director of the Global Entrepreneurship Development Institute.
Empretec Summit
Empretec, the Spanish acronym for emprendedores (entrepreneurs) and technología (technology), is a flagship capacity-building program of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development that aims to foster skills and competencies of successful entrepreneurs. Since its inception in 1988, it has trained more than 350 000 “empretecos” around the world in more than 35 countries. Empretec is recognized for it its high impact on entrepreneurship development, efficiency and growth of participating SMEs. The objective of the Global Empretec Summit is to explore business networking opportunities for Empretec directors and Empretec graduates visiting Milan as GEC participants in order to facilitate b2b cross border linkages among them and with other entrepreneurs. Join us at the second edition of the Global Empretec Summit to learn more about the program and how you can benefit from it in your country.
Angels Summit
The Angels Summit at the GEC will be an opportunity for a larger discussion about the role business angels play in developing healthy entrepreneurship ecosystem around the world. More details on this event will be made available soon.