Endeavor has been a strategic partner of Global Entrepreneurship Week since it launched in 2008 and continues to increase its involvement each year. It co-hosted the 2013 Global Entrepreneurship Congress in Brazil and now has affiliates leading national GEW campaigns in seven countries and serving as a key partner in 20 countries total.
Endeavor is leading the global movement to catalyze long-term economic growth by selecting, mentoring, and accelerating the best high-impact entrepreneurs around the world.
The following is a guest commentary from the team at Endeavor on the economic importance of entrepreneurial, high-growth companies.
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According to a recent report by the World Bank, the world is in the midst of a major job crisis that will require nearly 600 million jobs by 2030 to account for the growing global population. Even today, there are more than 100 million unemployed people across the top G20 economies, with over 400 million living on less than US $2 a day.
High-growth companies – or scale-ups – have been shown time and again to be powerful engines of job creation, offering a spark of hope to combat this crisis. Many are familiar with the idea of startups – the nascent ventures most often associated with mobile apps and Silicon Valley – but the power of the scale-up is not often as discussed. These more mature companies, defined as businesses with three-year growth in the excess of 20 percent, are a great force in the creation of quality jobs. These businesses have survived the initial hurdles of the startup phase and weathered market challenges to demonstrate their potential to be sustainable companies with long-term economic impact.
As an organization, Endeavor’s mission is to select, support and multiply the power and impact of scale-ups in markets that are most in need of job creation and entrepreneurial inspiration. A series of reports by Endeavor Insight have culled country-level data from the World Bank to better understand how these scale-ups, despite being a small percentage of a country’s total number of firms, can account for most of the new job creation. From Colombia to Mexico to Peru, unemployment rates are soaring, particularly among youth. Endeavor found that much of the new job growth in these economies over the past three years can overwhelmingly be traced to one type of business – the scale-up. In Colombia, for example, a survey of data from over 900 Colombian businesses found that, while only 8 percent were scale-ups, they accounted for nearly 45 percent of the country’s new jobs.
So what do scale-ups need in order to grow to the point where they can employ thousands of people? A survey conducted by Endeavor, Stanford University and the World Economic Forum asked more than 1,000 entrepreneurs around the world to identify the elements that could empower them to grow even further. Above other factors, the survey revealed that access to top talent, market opportunities and financial capital were the biggest challenges these entrepreneurs and their ventures face. A critical step to supporting these firms begins with expanding the global conversation around entrepreneurship to include the importance of businesses that scale.
In an effort to elevate this dialogue during GEW, Endeavor and a group of global entrepreneurship influencers have joined together to create The Global Scale Up Declaration, a pledge for influencers and stakeholders worldwide to do more to help entrepreneurs start and scale -- and what that can accomplish.
While there is clearly no magic bullet for the unemployment crisis the world is facing, empowering entrepreneurs to create and scale high-growth companies can make a very crucial – and very necessary – impact.