About GEN in Serbia

Serbia has been part of the Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN) unity since the earliest years of Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW), GEN’s flagship celebration of founders held each November. The national campaign was first led by Be Your Own Boss (Budi Svoj Čovek), a practical advisory service for people looking to start their own businesses. Under the leadership of Radmila Zlatanović, the organization used GEW to reach young Serbs with hands-on resources — launching a “Start Your Own Business” toolkit of manuals and practical guidance drawn from experienced entrepreneurs, convening roundtables with national and public institutions on the youth entrepreneurial environment, and running workshops on business planning, marketing, and finance. From the outset, the campaign was framed around a single goal: building a generation of empowered young entrepreneurs who could find success without leaving the country.

The campaign grew steadily through the early 2010s as new local hosts took up the effort. In more recent years, GEW activity in Serbia has been carried largely by the country’s ecosystem organizations rather than a single national host. A marquee GEW 2024 event in Niš featured a “Pop-up Export Hub” organized under the StarTech project, showcasing the export ambitions of Serbian startups — 63 percent of which reported plans to enter Asian markets — with participation from Vladimir Arsenović, State Secretary in the Ministry of Economy, Niš Mayor Dragoslav Pavlović, and Science Technology Park Niš director Milan Ranđelović.

The StarTech program — a multi-year innovation and digital-transformation initiative run by the National Alliance for Local Economic Development (NALED), in cooperation with the Government of Serbia — has become a recurring anchor for GEW-season activity. NALED, a public-private association of more than 330 members, used the 2025 campaign to launch a Small Business Council focused on women’s, innovative, and traditional entrepreneurship, and has consistently highlighted access to finance as the central challenge facing the country’s startups. While Serbia does not currently field a single official GEN campaign host, this ecosystem-led approach keeps the country connected to the global GEW movement each November.

GEN’s presence in Serbia has also included a national affiliate, GEN Serbia, which for several years connected local founders to the wider network under Miloš Došen. Serbia has been keen to increase its global interface. For example, GEN Serbia partnered with GEN Indonesia on an entrepreneurship “scale camp” designed to help Southeast European entrepreneurs expand into new markets — an example of the cross-border collaboration that defines the network.

Serbian founders have engaged GEN’s global programs directly. Since its global launch in 2019, the Entrepreneurship World Cup (EWC) has given Serbian startups access to free training resources, mentorship, and exposure to potential investors. Altaboxa, a Belgrade-based venture founded by Nikica Marinković that develops commercially viable, environmentally friendly packaging solutions, reached the EWC 100 in 2022 and pitched for a share of the prize pool at the EWC Global Finals in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

GEN’s research and knowledge networks reach Serbia as well. The country is profiled in the Global Startup Ecosystem Report (GSER), the annual study published by GEN and Startup Genome, whose 2026 edition highlights a maturing ecosystem anchored by the Digital Serbia Initiative, community builders such as Garaža, the Innovation Fund’s Katapult and Smart Start programs, and science and technology parks in Belgrade and Novi Sad. Serbia’s policy environment has also been documented in the GEN Atlas, including a detailed profile of the country’s IP Box regime — a tax incentive introduced in 2019 that lets companies exclude up to 80 percent of qualifying intellectual-property income, cutting the effective rate on that income from 15 to roughly 3 percent to encourage domestic research and development. On the investor side of the house, the Serbian Business Angel Network (SBAN) has been an active member of GEN’s Global Business Angels Network, linking the country’s early-stage investors to a worldwide community of angels.

GEN’s ongoing mission in Serbia is to keep the country’s founders, investors, and ecosystem builders connected to global markets, capital, and knowledge — helping ensure that Serbia’s growing base of innovative, export-oriented startups can scale well beyond the region.