Thousands of people from more than 150 countries attended the Global Entrepreneurship Congress (GEC) March 17-20 in Moscow, another sign that entrepreneurship is an international movement in an increasingly connected world.
“The summit continued the conversation about smarter policymaking started at last year’s GEC and explored topics such as Entrepreneurial City Leaders, Championing Legislation for Early Stage Capital and Moving Toward Evidence-Based Policymaking,” said Jonathan Ortmans, president of Global Entrepreneurship Week. “This year’s GEC marks the first time that the Global Entrepreneurship Research Network (GERN) convened. Announced during last October’s Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Kuala Lumpur, GERN was formed to fill the gaps in entrepreneurial research as we move towards having more robust discipline towards helping entrepreneurs.”
Global Entrepreneurship Week, an awareness and networking campaign founded in 2007 by Ortmans, a former Kauffman Foundation president and CEO, and former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, has grown from 37 to 140 countries since it started. Global Entrepreneurship Week this year is Nov. 17-23.
The field of international entrepreneurship has accelerated rapidly, with courses at leading universities and scholarly journals such as the Journal of Global Entrepreneurship Research and the International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal as well as countless centers, events, and publications. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), started in 1999 as a partnership between London Business School and Babson College in Massachusetts, conducts an annual survey that covers nearly 90 percent of the world GDP.
.The U.S. State Department launched a Global Entrepreneurship Program (GEP) in 2010 to foster public and private support for supporting entrepreneurs around the world in the areas of identifying, training, connecting and sustaining, guiding to financing, facilitating market access, enabling supportive policy, and celebrating entrepreneurs.
Another driver of international entrepreneurship is NestGSV – for Global Silicon Valley – that was founded to build a global network of innovation centers in support of entrepreneurs by 2020. ESTEEM Class of 2014 members visited NestGSV on their Spring Break trip to Silicon Valley. ESTEEM, where one-fourth of its students coming from outside the United States, is on the leading edge of this international movement, and it equips the new generation of entrepreneurs to advance innovation without borders.