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Jonathan Ortmans

Measuring the Impact of a Startup Visa

This week, President Obama will turn his focus from budget sequestration to immigration. A new Kauffman Foundation report released last week argues that making 75,000 Startup Visas available for current holders of H-1B and F-1 visas who start companies could create as much as 1.6 million U.S. jobs in the next 10 years. Will Washington act or, if they cannot agree, throw the baby out with the bath water?

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Posted by: Jonathan Ortmans

on March 04, 2013

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Category:  Immigration 

Startup Global

Thousands of people from 135 countries have already confirmed their participation for next month’s week-long Global Entrepreneurship Congress (GEC) and festival in Rio de Janeiro. As chair of the GEC for the past few years, I have witnessed the emergence of this global platform for collaboration among entrepreneurs, their investors and national leaders held outside the United States. So what happens at the GEC?

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Posted by: Jonathan Ortmans

on February 25, 2013

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Category:  General 

Financing Growth: Helping More Americans Help Entrepreneurs

In his State of the Union Address next week, President Obama will shift gears back to job creation after his inauguration speech focused on wider themes. As the debate about how the government can help the economy regain its pre-recession strength enters a new phase, the Kauffman Foundation’s annual “State of Entrepreneurship Address” last week in Washington, DC, focused on how financial constraints have been blocking the success of new and young firms that create most of the net new jobs.

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Posted by: Jonathan Ortmans

on February 11, 2013

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Category:  Capitol Hill 

Shaking the “Rotten Apple” Image in Ukraine

Since 2005, the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region leads the world in enhancing the business climate for local firms. The region overtook East Asia and the Pacific to become the second most business-friendly, after OECD high-income economies. However, one country, the Ukraine, has been described as the “rotten apple” in the region, comparing unfavorably to its neighboring countries. After meeting the “Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Ukraine to the United States,” I decided to take a closer look.

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Posted by: Jonathan Ortmans

on February 04, 2013

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America's Loss is India's Gain

This week we can expect President Obama to speak to immigration reform and a new immigration proposal to be unveiled in the Senate. I have discussed in this blog the importance of creating a U.S. Startup Visa for high skilled immigrants—but only in the context of America’s loss. We take a look today on what America's loss in terms of brainpower and innovation skills means for one nation—India.

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Posted by: Jonathan Ortmans

on January 28, 2013

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Category:  Global 

Global Prospects for Startup Legislation in 2013

Every year, reports from the World Bank, the OECD and numerous private sector researchers tell us that nations are improving their regulatory environment in terms of reducing the complexity and cost of regulatory processes for starting a business. However, comprehensive reforms to stimulate startup creation are still relatively hard to find. Will the ever-intensifying global race to build strong startup ecosystems from the bottom-up change this?

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Posted by: Jonathan Ortmans

on January 14, 2013

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Category:  Global 

Entrepreneurs and Last Week’s Fiscal Deal

Unless you completely unplugged over the holidays, you know that if Democratic and Republican lawmakers could not bridge their differences on how best to reduce the nation's budget deficit and debt, the Budget Control Act of 2011 mandated a combination of spending cuts and tax increases to take effect January 1, 2013. While Washington kicked the can down the road on budget cuts, the cliff was avoided – but what does the deal mean for American entrepreneurs?

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Posted by: Jonathan Ortmans

on January 07, 2013

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Category:  Capitol Hill 

Gulf States Focus on New Starts

At the Global Entrepreneurial Summit (GES) in Dubai last week, it was clear to me that there is a new level of engagement in developing more entrepreneurial economies at the highest levels of government in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The summit, a collaboration between the U.A.E. Prime Minister’s office and the Obama Administration, was an effort to leverage U.S. strengths in high growth entrepreneurship. Now that the summit is over, we take a look at the challenges before policymakers in the region in making the path easier for even more nascent entrepreneurs to succeed in the future.

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Posted by: Jonathan Ortmans

on December 17, 2012

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Category:  Global 

The Shaping of Thailand´s Entrepreneurship Ecosystem

This year has afforded me the opportunity to visit dozens of nations and talk with their entrepreneurs. One nation remained elusive to me. In 2011, Thailand participated for the first time in Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) and I was keen to visit in either 2011 or 2012, but despite good faith efforts, I have been unable to make it there, mostly due to the likes of tragic flooding, the worst in 50 years last year for the country. So I turn today to virtual research.

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Posted by: Jonathan Ortmans

on December 10, 2012

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We Still Need a Startup Nation Movement

A recent blog by Dan Isenberg from Babson College argues that there has been too much focus on startups around the world and that “infinitely more important is to embed scale-up.” Of course, Dan has a point in that I frequently hear leaders outside the United States lament their lack of billion dollars firms, but I think we are far from the point when we can stop advocating for better support for new starts. Not only is most of the world still focused on size not age of firms—talking “SMEs”—but we still do not know enough about the science of startups and how to best support those that want to scale. As with kids—to play along with Isenberg’s analogy—we have to help firms start better if they are to scale later in life and now is not the time to pull back the throttle on legitimizing founders and startups as a centrepiece of that economy policy.

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Posted by: Jonathan Ortmans

on December 03, 2012

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Category:  Global 

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