Entrepreneurship policy champions across Latin America and the Caribbean are moving swiftly to catch up with the big players in the region and the world. Several tools and gatherings, like the 4th Annual Seminar-Workshop for Professionals in the Entrepreneurship Ecosystem in Latin America held in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic in May, are ensuring continuity in policy efforts.
At that event, the trend of “entrepreneurs in residence” in government was recognized as one of the catalyzers for the entrepreneurship push coming from the public sector. Examples include Startup Nations members Gary Urteaga (government advisor for Startup Peru), Luis Florez (senior advisor to Colombia’s national government and Medellin), Mariano Mayer (Entrepreneurship Director at the Buenos Aires City Government), and Walther Morales (national entrepreneurship advisor for Guatemala).
Following the OECD Development Centre’s report on Start-up Latin America, which identified new generation policy levers in six countries in the region (Chile, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Argentina and Mexico), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and PRODEM, a research organization based in Argentina and member of the Global Entrepreneurship Research Network, released an index benchmarking the status of national startup ecosystems across Latin America. This Index of Systemic Conditions for Dynamic Entrepreneurship aims to serve as a tool for action in Latin America, by mapping the strengths, weaknesses and opportunities across the region.
Co-author Hugo Kantis explains in the prologue that the report responds to the strong need for indicators voiced at the 2013 Startup Nations Summit in Malaysia, and seeks to avoid the risk of entrepreneurship becoming a mere “compulsory item on a Government’s agenda that ultimately fails to take on the necessary scale and scope”.
Here are a few of the findings:
- Governments with dissimilar political views agree that entrepreneurship is desirable and worth furthering.
- Top five players in the region are Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Costa Rica and Argentina. However, even the leading countries are lagging far behind the global top three, namely United States, Finland and Singapore.
- The contributions made by science and technology are still quite low in the region, suppressing growth entrepreneurship.
With regards to the last finding, the Organization of American States’ (OAS) Young Americas Business Trust (YABT) is seeking to move the frontier of innovative new businesses forward with the Talent and Innovation Competition (TIC) Americas competition, which had its finals on June 1-2 in Asuncion, Paraguay. The finals will occur alongside the annual OAS assembly.
The World Bank’s Infodev program in turn has been helping form REDLAC, the network of business incubators in Latin America and the Caribbean in the region.
There is a lot happening in the region. We will continue to receive updates on this website from our members, such as from the one recently submitted by Startup Peru.