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The Policy Dialogue on Entrepreneurship Informs and connects thought leaders looking to understand policies that help entrepreneurs start companies, create jobs and strengthen the economy. Sign up to receive our weekly update!
This year has brought a lot of productive give-and-take of ideas on clean energy innovation by people around the world who saw opportunity rather than doom in the combination of environmental and financial challenges. Last May, for example, I joined over 140 participants from all...
Readers of this column are now well acquainted with this author’s views on the central role in re-starting the global economy of those unperturbed citizens around the world who see opportunity rather than doom. Often driven by a desired to do well and do good and an interest in not working for Wall Street’s CEOs but using them as mentors, our new generation of entrepreneurs are geared up and underway. They are also global in their mindsets.
We should approach innovation in a similar fashion, taking steps to boost R&D and the commercialization of new technologies at home, while at the same time scouring the world to help those with the best innovative ideas, programs and policies that nurture innovation. When the fires burn out and the market bottoms out, it will be the entrepreneurs who seed the new ideas and jobs from the ashes.
Today, I attended the House Committee on Science and Technology’s Subcommittee on Research and Science Education a hearing titled “From the Lab Bench to the Marketplace: Improving Technology Transfer.” The representatives heard from experts on ways to approach the improvement of the process of transferring...
The innovation legislation pieces discussed yesterday in the House Committee on Science and Technology corresponded with three sectors of innovation policies—information technology, energy, and services—discussed at a gathering I attended the same day by The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF). Stuart Benjamin and Arti...
The record number of pro-entrepreneurship legal and regulatory reforms in the past year among the economies studied by the World Bank’s Doing Business project is welcome news during a time of global economic recession. Prioritizing reforms and learning from global best practices hold enormous potential to unleash entrepreneurship. To maximize this potential, leaders must also promote a culture that embraces entrepreneurship.
As with any politically loaded term, any attempt at honest discussion of ‘regulation’ risks getting caught up in a web of assumptions and intellectual shortcuts. One common fallacy is to put government regulation (e.g. patent laws, health care, tax compliance regulations, etc.) on one end of a continuum in which innovation and entrepreneurship are the opposite policy preference. However, a new approach seems to be emerging in innovation discussions: that the freedom to innovate is not governed by how much or how little regulation innovators face, but how smart it is.
The following is a collaborative post by Jonathan Ortmans, president of the Public Forum Institute and a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, and Anders Hoffman, Director of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy for Erhvervs- og Byggestyrelsen
Denmark is in many ways a paradoxical country. It has the world’s highest taxes and yet Danes are among the happiest people in the world according to the U.S. National Science Foundation. Denmark has generous social benefits, a large public sector and yet is quite innovative and entrepreneurial. The Global Competitiveness Report and the Index of Economic Freedom both rank Denmark 9th on their world lists, and the Legatum Prosperity Index ranks the country 6th in entrepreneurship and innovation. Denmark did not end in the top ten of these world lists by chance. What steps and policy initiatives made this possible?
We have long argued that the American model for development assistance could improve dramatically if entrepreneurship becomes a stronger element of economic development efforts. Unfortunately, the importance of new firm creation is a concept that has yet to gain relevance in traditional development models, such as the Washington Consensus. However, there are a few actors who understand the power of entrepreneurship and have been using it to improve lives. Diaspora entrepreneurs are using their experience and understanding about entrepreneurship to invest in new ventures in their country of origin. These transnational entrepreneurs view a globe of porous borders.
Last June, the United Nations Development Program released its Human Development Report for Egypt, which noted that 90 percent of the country’s unemployed, estimated to be 8 million, were younger than 30. Not surprisingly, time and again at post-revolution gatherings of political leaders and civil sector organizations set on creating a clear roadmap for the country’s political and economic development, youth entrepreneurship emerges as a key recommendation.
With more women than men in the U.S. earning PhDs in the biological sciences and estimates that around 15 percent of the U.S. GNP over the next two decades will be comprised of life science activities, it is no surprise that women's entrepreneurship has attracted so much attention recently in both the developed and developing countries. And in many other countries, women's entrepreneurship is even more important as a separate track for cultural reasons.
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