Posts Tagged ‘Entrepreneurship’

Global Entrepreneurship Week

Global Entrepreneurship Week, the world’s first-ever celebration of enterprising behaviour, comes at a time of massive economic change.

Recognising the global nature of many of the challenges we face, Global Entrepreneurship Week aims to connect enterprising young people with their counterparts all over the world, and ultimately create a global movement of entrepreneurial people.

Created by the UK’s business-led, government-backed Make Your Mark campaign and the US-based Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the first Global Entrepreneurship Week will see millions of young people participate.

Globally more than 13,000 events are taking place in 77 countries involving an estimated five million people, from Bolivia to Bulgaria and Mexico to Mozambique.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who launched Enterprise Week in the UK – the model taken for Global Entrepreneurship Week, said: “Global Entrepreneurship Week brings young people together across national borders, taking enterprise to the classroom and giving young people the confidence and self-belief not only to develop tomorrow’s big ideas but to put them into practice. “And Global Entrepreneurship Week will reach millions of young people – half a million in Britain alone, and to each one of them my challenge is this:

Believe in your ideas and make them happen. Because entrepreneurial spirit changes the world and it changes it for good. “You can be making a difference, so be bold, be imaginative, be brilliant. That’s really what this week is all about. Enjoy it.”

Carl Schramm, President and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation said: “For seven days, millions of young people around the world will be introduced to entrepreneurship and encouraged to think about how innovation can take them anywhere, no matter their location on the map. “Now more than ever it is imperative that we do everything we can to promote enterprise. As the world global economic downturn deepens, we are relying on entrepreneurial people with new thinking to lead us out of the recession.”

The President of Portugal, Prof. Aníbal Cavaco Silva said “I’m proud to associate my-self to this movement to wake-up, stimulate and mobilize, in particular young generations, the spirit of entrepreneurship, creativity and initiative.”

Born to be an Entrepreneur?

Are Entrepreneurs Born? Or Made?

What do you think? Are you born an entrepreneur? Do you become one early in life? Or are entrepreneurs likely to start businesses out of hard-won expertise who then start a business around their skills and networks?

Recent research shows that entrepreneurs are not likely to come from entrepreneurial families. And not all business owners identified themselves as being entrepreneurial-minded in college. Instead, 69% started their own businesses within 10 years of working for someone else

In other words, the most likely path to entrepreneurship is the simplest one: you work for someone, become an expert in a technical area, build a network of contacts, then strike out on your own, presumably with a believe that you can solve a problem or build a better mousetrap than competitors