Global Entrepreneurship Week co-founder and GEN president Jonathan Ortmans

delivers his annual opening address.

(Video Transcript):

When we launched Global Entrepreneurship Week 16 years ago, we set out with a mission to convince the rest of the world that Silicon Valley didn’t have a monopoly on entrepreneurship. How far we have come in just a decade and a half. Our campaign theme this year is “Entrepreneurs Thrive Here.” We now have small communities, towns, cities and nations shouting from the rooftops that entrepreneurship is alive and healthy and something that they support and encourage. This week, Global Entrepreneurship Week 2023, we expect to have over 40,000 events reaching more than 10 million attendees happening in almost every place on earth. This is really a testament to the success of this campaign over the years – that we now have a common global entrepreneurial ecosystem. This is very, very powerful. We have an ecosystem that is full of people united by the sheer force of our collective determination to fix the world in which we live. We are united by human capacity to transform our curiosity into technologies that spread across the world and improve our own lives and those of our fellow citizens.

This week we will be celebrating this great spirit of entrepreneurship and we will be celebrating what makes your community a home to those with big ideas and bubbling ambitions. We want to know from you what draws out the innovators, the creators, the risk takers. We’ll be celebrating what makes them and your communities a good place to experiment and grow. We are instilling what we hope is a sense of pride in entrepreneurial skills. We hope this week we will have a chance to have more confidence during troubling times, that we can do more together and that we have more in common with each other than what divides us. Global Entrepreneurship Week is made possible through the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. We also have the support of companies like Federal Express who are helping take this campaign into communities that have not had the confidence or the path or the understanding of how to join the great global entrepreneurial ecosystems that allow us to unleash our creative potential.

I for one will be travelling around the world. I’ll be stopping in San Francisco, where the United States is hosting the APEX Summit. I’ll be heading to open Global Entrepreneurship Week in China. I’ll be stopping in Singapore. I’ll be in Johannesburg, South Africa where we have our Africa headquarters, 22 on Sloane. We will be celebrating once again with one of our big champions President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa. I’ll be ending in Europe. This year, Europe is especially exciting. Not only do we have an SME Summit of policymakers in Spain but there is also Web Summit happening in Lisbon. Big thanks to Startup Genome, which will be hosting an event for innovators on the sidelines of Web Summit in Lisbon.

Before returning to the United States, there will be a lot of other things we are doing on the road. I know that Door Dash, for example, is providing disaster relief grants to entrepreneurs all over the world who are running local restaurants. We’ve got WeWork focused on United Kingdom and the United States doing events in their facilities, and some people that are just very focused on people from outside of their place of entrepreneurship, like the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park that will be hosting programs for entrepreneurs from around the world. You’ll see many of GEN’s programs out in full force this week. For example, our Startup Huddle chapters will be hosting activities in 20 cities. You’ll see our GEN Research teams releasing reports such as the report coming from South America where we will focus on what is happening in those markets. We will also see our media team. We will be doing, for example, a fireside chat with the Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. Thank you, Jason. And much, much more.

But the most important voice will be your voice so I hope you will join on your favorite social media channel. Use the hashtag #GEW2023 or #EntrepreneursThriveHere and tell us what you think. If you want more information, you can Google Global Entrepreneurship Week or go to GEW.CO and you can certainly find more information there. You can access what’s happening in your part of the world but there’s also one thing I’d like you to do for me. There is also an opportunity for you to participate in a survey. Tell us what you think of Global Entrepreneurship Week. How can we make it better? How can be build it into an even bigger movement, an even bigger force for good around uniting us as a people around what we do as entrepreneurs rather than what divides us.

That’s where I’d like to close my remarks, if I can. I think it’s especially important that we remember that we do have this powerful, common global entrepreneurial ecosystem – a community where we have more in common with each other than what divides us – and a community which is extremely important at a time when many of our nations are building distrust and may be polarizing and separating from each other and becoming quite extreme in our differences. I think entrepreneurship and especially a global campaign like this has an opportunity to remind us that actually we are about improving the lives of our fellow citizens. We should be about creating things, we should be about sharing things and this is an opportunity for us to focus on one thing for which we all have in common and that is the need for a healthy, safe and stable life and economy. I hope that you will join this movement, reach out to someone from a different place and be part of what we hope is an important campaign to the benefit of us all. Happy Global Entrepreneurship Week 2023.

Source: genglobal