Editor’s note: This post comes to us from Jonathan Ortmans, who is the Chair of the Global Entrepreneurship Congress and President of Global Entrepreneurship Week.
Policymakers around the world are pulling levers and pushing programs to promote entrepreneurial growth – but what is working and how closely tuned are they to the needs of high-growth, high-impact entrepreneurs? Come to Moscow this March and find out for yourself.
The sixth annual Global Entrepreneurship Congress (GEC) will convene during March 17-20 right next to the Kremlin and the Red Square, at the historic Moscow Manege, connecting roughly 2,000 entrepreneurship leaders and supporters from 140 countries.
Starting last year when it convened in Rio de Janeiro, the GEC now offers an engaging policy platform on its opening day. The GEC Research+Policy Summit features earnest, startup-savvy policymakers anxious to support entrepreneurial growth by pulling the right policy levers and removing regulatory roadblocks, present their ideas, and receive questions from seasoned and nascent entrepreneurs, as well as researchers.
This year, several representatives will participate in that conversation, such as Stefano Firpo, Chief of the Technical Secretariat at the Italian Ministry of Economic Development, who co-drafted the Startup Italy legislative package; Mayor Sly James of Kansas City, who helped bring Google Fiber to his city and rally support for national pro-entrepreneurship immigration reform; Gordon Maras, the Croatian Minister of Entrepreneurship and Crafts, who helped his country become the first in Europe to launch a regional Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning; and Mayor Sergey Sobyanin of Moscow, who is ready to prove that the capital of one of the world’s “strong government” economies can work with bottom-up, organic startup communities.
Many of these policymakers stay for the rest of the Congress to continue connecting with entrepreneurs and like-minded peers—adding to an informal network of policymakers. Called the Startup Nations Policy Network, this informal group aggregates startup-savvy policy advisors, many of which are working behind the scenes, doing the “heavy-lifting” such as implementing programs on the ground or drafting paradigm-changing legislation for entrepreneurship. This network is all about sharing lessons and identifying policy levers that can unleash high-impact entrepreneurship and innovation, as well as connecting to research.
In Moscow, the members of the Startup Nations Policy Network will interface with those of the recently-formed Global Entrepreneurship Research Network (GERN) which has been impressed at the potential of these government officials who are engaged in smarter government-led policy and programs. GERN aims at translating research into actionable policy recommendations, by collaborating. Its founding members include the Kauffman Foundation, Endeavor Insight, and the World Bank.
The GEC Research+Policy Summit and satellite meetings of the Startups Nations Policy Network and GERN will mark only the beginning, albeit a strategic one, of the larger Congress. During the GEC Start+Scale Forum on the second day (Tuesday March 18th), new trends in entrepreneurship, such as the sharing economy and the producer movement, will be the topic of discussion. In addition, like last year in Rio de Janeiro and the previous one in Liverpool, the GEC will include dozens of fringe events that have turned this annual event from a gathering of the national leaders of Global Entrepreneurship Week into the world’s largest festival for startup champions and entrepreneurs.
The Global Entrepreneurship Congress in Moscow offers a common platform for all startup ecosystem players. This has not come easy, but rather over the years, through the aggregate efforts and synergies of thousands of entrepreneurship champions around the world who made entrepreneurship a universal language, understood across sectors and nations. The expected legacy of Moscow: fresh assessments of pro-entrepreneurship efforts, newly identified opportunities for collaborations, better-targeted programs, and better-informed policies. Don’t miss it.
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