About GEN in Russia

GEN began operating in Russia in 2008, when it partnered with the U.S. Russia Center for Entrepreneurship (CFE) and Junior Achievement Russia to conduct the inaugural national Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) campaign. It was an immediate success engaging secondary schools, universities and emerging founders across the country to celebrate new-firm formation. The roots of GEN’s work in Russia predate the formal launch of GEW. In the 1990s, GEN founder Jonathan Ortmans worked on integrating emerging Russian markets with Western capital systems in the 1990s and transitioning former state-employed technical experts into high-tech entrepreneurship.

Following 2008 launch, the annual GEW campaign quickly grew into one of the largest in the world. The next year, GEW Russia, reached more than 450,000 participants through 10,000 activities, and the Role of Microfinance in Overcoming the Financial Economic Crisis conference in Moscow featured Nobel Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus and Princess Máxima of the Netherlands. In 2010, the campaign reported more than 1.5 million participants, making it the largest national GEW campaign in the world.

As the GEW campaign grew, Russian policymakers became active participants and joined GEN’s Startup Nations community bringing Russian perspectives on innovation policy and ecosystem development into a global exchange of policy ideas. Startup Nations is a collection of policymakers and government officials from more than 80 countries focused on reducing barriers to new firm formation and accelerating entrepreneurial growth. Alexei Komissarov, then head of Moscow’s Department of Science, Industrial Policy and Entrepreneurship, and Ekaterina Pankratova of the Skolkovo Foundation, championed Moscow’s emergence as an entrepreneurship hub, which led to Moscow hosting the Global Entrepreneurship Congress (GEC).

The GEC Moscow 2014 at the Manege building outside the walls of Red Square was opened by Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin who welcomed more than 7,000 startup champions from delegations representing 153 nations — more countries than had participated the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. Held against the backdrop of heightened geopolitical tensions due to Russian incursions into Crimea that week, the Congress demonstrated the willingness of entrepreneurial ecosystems to collaborate across geopolitical differences. Anchored by the Start + Scale Forum and the Research + Policy Summit, GEC Moscow featured more than 45 official events and brought together serial entrepreneurs and investors, national ministers and city leaders from around the world.

GEC Moscow was a turning point for GEN as the extraordinary turnout in a moment of geopolitical strain produced momentum among the grassroots communities leading Global Entrepreneurship Week to evolve from a one-week celebration into network with year-round programming. The Congress also hosted the inaugural meeting of the Global Entrepreneurship Research Network, a collaboration supported by the Kauffman Foundation, Endeavor Insight and the World Bank, and launched new coalitions promoting entrepreneurship education.

In 2015, GEN and CFE began rolling out a portfolio of programs designed to strengthen local entrepreneurial ecosystems across Russia. Within a few years, GEN and CFE operated in 10 Russian cities — Kirov, Krasnodar, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Rostov-on-Don, Tomsk, St. Petersburg, Tyumen, Vladimir and Voronezh — implementing a comprehensive program that identified ecosystem builders, delivered innovative, best-in-class programming and measured outcomes around new firm formation, revenue growth and job creation.

The flagship intervention – ScaleUp in Russia – was a nine-month acceleration program informed by Prof. Daniel Isenberg of Babson College that immersed entrepreneurs in training and mentorship. Two of first three early cohorts created 262 new jobs, with more than 62 percent of participating companies seeing revenue growth and 57 percent growing revenue by more than 25 percent. In 2017, during GEW, GEN and CFE hosted a Scale-Up Summit in Moscow for representatives from regions across Russia.

The campaign that year engaged 150 partner organizations, 210 events, with St. Petersburg running a full week of programming supported by the Department of Small and Medium Business Development and the Ministry of Economic Development.

Also in 2017, GEN and CFE piloted Startup Huddle – GEN’s peer-to-peer program designed to support local founders through regular community meetups – in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Its success led GEN and CFE to launch eight new Huddle chapters during GEW. This connected Russian founders to GEN’s global startup community, which resulted in nine Russian startups reaching the Entrepreneurship World Cup (EWC) finals and gaining access to pro bono training resources, mentorship and exposure to potential investors. DRD Biotech, Group-IB and Motorica reached the EWC 100 in 2019; CLEAPL and Roistat in 2020; BumbTech, Intellogic (Botkin.ai) and VR Concept in 2021; and Ntechlab in 2022.

Russia’s research community contributed to the foundational years of GEN’s knowledge work. Launched at GEC Moscow 2014 with Russian researchers and policy institutions, the Global Entrepreneurship Research Network (GERN) led efforts to develop a member-endorsed methodology for ecosystem mapping and an open-access database extending to 100 global cities. Russian representation also participated in GEN Space, GEN’s community of space sector leaders, with Ekaterina Pankratova and Ekaterina Vainberg of Moscow serving on the GEN Space board.

The outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022 forced GEN to suspend its formal operations and national campaigns inside Russia. Nevertheless, GEN is poised to resume its mission in Russia when the time is right having built and maintained extensive relationships with key Russian ecosystem stakeholders, including the Moscow City Department of Science, Industrial Policy and Entrepreneurship, the Ministry of Economic Development, the Skolkovo Foundation, and regional administrations across more than 10 metropolitan areas. GEN also integrated hundreds of Russian founders into its global events and cross-border initiatives such as the G20 Young Entrepreneurs’ Alliance. As mentioned above, GEN’s founder and president, Jonathan Ortmans has extensive experience working with Russia’s entrepreneurs while living there in the 1990s. Many of the founders, ecosystem builders and ideas seeded through GEN’s years of work in Russia continue to contribute to the broader global entrepreneurship community.