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The Resource Center has all the info you'll need From content to user feedback, the resource center has the information you need for every level of the entrepreneurial process.
Following up on chatter following my blog last week discussing the need for caution around the quality of interventions that seek to provide technical support to entrepreneurs, I will continue the conversation thread this week with a post discussing another innovative entrepreneurial support program - iStart, which happens to open for business today.
The Chilean economy has been recognized as the most competitive of Latin America. In general, Chile has been characterized by political and economic stability and relatively low levels of corruption and offers one of the most advanced physical infrastructure systems in the region. The potential and proven track record of this economy has led to Chile’s recent accession to the OECD as its 31st member and its first member in South America. Not surprisingly, Chile is often a case study in economic development. The question is whether its model will show the power of entrepreneurship as an engine for prosperity?
In the 90s, Argentina became Latin America’s Internet center, which was a good sign of an entrepreneurial spirit among its people. Endeavor, the United States nonprofit that helps foster high impact entrepreneurship, had its first success in the developing world in Argentina just before the country’s last major financial collapse. Given Argentina’s turbulent economic history, I thought I would take a quick look at the role of entrepreneurs over the past 10 years since Argentina’s Internet startup boom.
Like many developing countries, Bolivia has a nascent, but promising entrepreneurial environment. The country has a good number of institutions that offer financial and technical services that network the country’s millions of micro-entrepreneurs. However, as readers of this blog are well aware, data has confirmed time and again that it is young firms that grow that provide the most benefits to society in terms of job and wealth creation and innovation. Thus, the challenge ahead for Bolivia is to enable more growth entrepreneurs.
I returned this weekend from the Aspen Institute’s annual meeting of development entrepreneurs in New York where fresh thinkers were hard at work looking for new approaches to impactful international economic development. USAID Administrator Dr. Rajiv Shah sought out the opportunity to present his new vision for his agency, and Carl Schramm, President of the Kauffman Foundation, challenged the traditional strategic and intellectual platform that has driven the tired policies of decades of Washington consensus thinking around how we stimulate global economic growth.
The past few months have brought a new series of reports dissecting the job creation phenomenon by new firms, timely at a time when so much of the economic discussion lately in the U.S. has focused on strategies to recover the roughly 8 million jobs lost during this past recession. We already knew that research has firmly established that new firms—those no more than five years old—over the past three decades have been responsible for virtually all of the net new jobs created in the U.S. economy (see 2009 reports “Jobs Created from Business Startups in the United States,” and “Where Will The Jobs Come From?”). As the nation debates this leading up to the mid-term elections in the United States, let’s further examine U.S. job growth and its relationship to startup companies.
While the global financial crisis impacted almost all new entrepreneurs, it began in developed countries and hit their entrepreneurs harder. As a result, in richer countries, new business creation dropped sharply amid the crisis. In contrast, new business registrations in many low-income countries didn't change much. These are the findings in The 2010 World Bank Group Entrepreneurship Snapshots, which presents data collected about newly registered companies in 112 countries and was released recently.
The China we knew as the enormous economy largely fueled by cheap labor and inexpensive manufacturing has changed. Though happening slowly compared to its potential, China is becoming one of the most innovative economies on the planet and the birthplace of entrepreneurs like Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, who are entrepreneurial rock stars at home and around the world. Entrepreneurial capitalism seems to be taking hold in China. How is entrepreneurship overcoming the roadblocks of a planned economy?
Last week I participated in an interesting gathering in Washington, DC of top medical and policy experts who issued a new health care manifesto that might be of interest to entrepreneurs in the space. Hosted by the Council for American Medical Innovation, FasterCures and the Kauffman Foundation, the 2010 Translational Medicine Alliance Forum (TMAF) brought together leaders from academia, government agencies, and pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and venture industries to discuss models to enable and accelerate the progress of translational medicine.
I have just returned today from a short visit to South Korea where I addressed an international conference and met with various universities both in Seoul and Daejeon Valley – described to me by locals as Korea’s Silicon Valley.
Visitors arriving at Seoul’s acclaimed airport can only be impressed by its sophisticated application of technology into everyday lives. The train I rode from Seoul to Daejoen cruised at 300 Kilometers per hour, every taxi in Seoul was clean and paid for with a back seat touchpad card reader and the urban planning seemed super smart with local government being placed in beautiful floating structures on the river and national government being moved altogether out of Seoul.
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