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The Polish startup scene is looking increasingly vibrant. For some time now, technology blogs have been covering Polish startup expos, competitions and meetings such as Startup Weekend, PitchRally, E-nnovation and Startup Fest that are happening with some regularity across major cities. And Poland was one of the first winners of a Global Entrepreneurship Week Award. Is Poland poised to take the lead in Eastern Europe?
The JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act is one small step away from becoming law after its fast passage in Congress and President Obama has given reassurance that he will sign the bill when it gets to his desk this week (probably Thursday). The passage of the JOBS Act last Tuesday during a politically charged time is proof that entrepreneurship promotion is a bipartisan issue. As the clock moves relentlessly toward November, both sides of the aisle found common focus and set out to solve the entrepreneurial access to capital problem. The American public should be proud of how functional Washington was these past few weeks.
While the Baltic countries are small compared to their EU partners, they are said to have an outsized role in generating new start-ups, particularly through their big ideas in the tech sector. Today, we look at Lithuania, which has been campaigning aggressively through Global Entrepreneurship Week in the Baltics and has rapidly been gaining a place on the entrepreneurial map.
While politicians are out of town campaigning, the nation’s capital has been welcoming leaders in entrepreneurship education from America’s colleges and universities. Following a warm up from the younger “Empact” entrepreneurship education advocates, I joined a packed summit of university and community college presidents at the White House put together by the Commerce Department’s Nish Acharya, and then spoke this past Friday at Jeff Reid’s Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers conference at Georgetown University. It is increasingly clear that America’s colleges and universities have been retooling as engines of entrepreneurship and innovation.
When I asked two U.S. Senators from different parties earlier this year how they managed to work together on startup legislation during an election year, both talked of “credible, robust data” as their starting point. Last week I participated in the International Council for Small Business (ICSB) 3rd Annual Global Entrepreneurship Research and Policy Conference at George Washington University to see what was emerging outside the United States.
One of the major supporters of DEMO Africa and LIONS@frica with me in Nairobi last week was Nokia. As I took a look at just how much innovation Nokia has created, I was curious to look further into the current startup culture in its home country of Finland and see just how important high-growth entrepreneurship is to its economy.
While the world gathered in New York last week for the Clinton Global Initiative and UN General Assembly meetings, I elected to accept an invitation to head out of town to check up on progress with one of the world’s “strong government” economies grappling with how to reconcile a tradition of top-down government control with a desire for bottom up organic startup communities.
I report this week from Africa which is enjoying its greatest economic success in decades and where there has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur. With economic growth rates this year around 6 percent in one-third of the 49 sub-Saharan African countries, the IMF forecasts that Africa will have the fastest-growing economy of any continent over the next five years. The World Bank in turn has reported earlier this month that more than 20 sub-Saharan African countries, encompassing more than 400 million people, have gained middle-income status, while the number of people living in poverty is down by roughly 10 percentage points over the past decade.
As elections approach and there is a lot of debate on which is the best road to a robust economy with more jobs, policymakers should take time to listen to the message of the just-released Kaufman Foundation videos on the benefits of high-skilled immigration. With Washington being unwilling to separate the obviously different issues of high-skilled immigration and how to handle illegal immigrants, a net job gain strategy remains hostage to politics as usual in the nation’s capitol.
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