High impact startups are now springing up in the most unexpected corners of the world. Developing Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) over the past decade on behalf of the Kauffman Foundation has allowed me to visit entrepreneurs and those who help them launch new ventures and take them to scale in nearly 100 countries. If we can make progress in challenging societies like Iran and Venezuela, the opportunities to establish entrepreneurial capitalism in more open economies is low hanging fruit ripe with potential.
What successful startup communities have in common is a more sophisticated entrepreneurial mindset — a common set of underlying beliefs and assumptions that make them more likely to succeed in the face of limited resources and challenging circumstances. For example, increasingly they seek mentorship and connections ahead of direct asks for financing. They see themselves as problem-solvers first and “business people” second. As founder teams they prize starting lean, failing fast and the iterative process of getting it right over rigidly adhering to business plans. And, best of all, while their immediate task may be as mundane as a new App, they talk about changing the world.
There is data from a Kauffman Foundation study done just before Global Entrepreneurship Week last year that suggests that entrepreneurship is viral. Once that mindset is rooted in an ecosystem, it spreads. Not surprisingly, policymakers around the world have taken note and are rushing to figure out how to remove barriers to entrepreneurship in their communities and countries. Global Entrepreneurship Week and the year-round network it has spurned is trying to help them.
For example, last November, 126 heads of state and ministers from 69 countries participated in Global Entrepreneurship Week – speaking at events, filming statements of support and endorsing the national campaigns in their countries. Nations who care about better leveraging the economic potential of new firm formation are hiring entrepreneurship policy advisors with roots in startup communities and bringing them in-house. The results of this convergence of actors are reflected in legislatures for example adapting financial regulations to give crowdfunding a role in capital markets, or in revisiting frameworks for immigration policy, regulatory issues and intellectual property.
This globalization of entrepreneurship has brought an exciting explosion of programs, startup communities and investments but exposed new gaps in our knowledge showing a paucity of data around what works and what does not in supporting nascent entrepreneurs and new firms preparing to scale. The challenge now is to figure out how best to instill this entrepreneurial mindset in more people from every background, culture and discipline.
This collection of essays talks about some of the efforts to scale the promotion of entrepreneurship around the world. We must scale these efforts in pursuit of embedding the entrepreneurial mindset in more of our citizens while at the same time always viewing our methodology in this endeavor as experiments after which we collect data and results and implement adjustments. Like any other field it will only be through scientific methodology that we can unleash the true potential of more of our citizens as entrepreneurs and empower them to lift their fellow citizens out of poverty, build vibrant new economies and solve the world’s greatest challenges.