Matt Smith

Matt Smith is Vice President at the Global Entrepreneurship Network, where he drives much of the organization's interface with governments in 180 nations. Matt has worked at the heart of the UK’s world-leading entrepreneurial ecosystem for over 15 years, first as co-founder of student entrepreneur charity NACUE, and most recently as co-founder of the Centre for Entrepreneurs (CFE) - a UK-based entrepreneurship foundation. Under CFE, Matt published policy-focused research reports on topics as diverse as seaside town revival, ex-prisoner rehabilitation, small firm procurement and military entrepreneurship. His reports on university incubators and refugee entrepreneurs led to the creation of best-practice communities, the latter of which now connects refugee entrepreneurship organisations across 28 countries. Matt also has experience translating research into practice, working with the UK government to pilot and scale entrepreneurship programmes supporting prisoners and refugees. Matt also helped launch the European Startup Network in 2016 and from 2020 has served on the board of the National Enterprise Network - connecting enterprise support organisations across the UK. He remains a Senior Fellow at CFE.