Global Entrepreneurship Week 2015

This week is a very special time for entrepreneurs and investors because this week marks not only the opening of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) meeting, which the Philippines is hosting, but also the launching of the annual Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW).

GEW is celebrated every third week of November and aims to recognize entrepreneurs and their contributions to society, as well as inspire people from all walks of life to consider entrepreneurship as one way to become financially independent.

Like any startup, GEW started as an idea that became a global movement. Founded in 2007 with 37 countries led by Jonathan Ortmans, president of GEW, Carl Scharmm, CEO of Kauffman Foundation and Gordon Brown, former Prime Minister of UK, GEW was officially launched as entrepreneurial awareness campaign. Through the years, the GEW has grown increasingly as platform for collaboration and connections with more countries joining every year. Today, GEW is celebrated by 160 countries around the world. The Philippines is proud to be one of the active country members of GEW through the efforts of Young Entrepreneur Society (YES) as the official host. This year, YES has partnered with 100 providers to organize over 300 business and entrepreneurial events happening this November.

Much as everyone is encouraged to go into business, there was no way to measure how much the impact of such campaign has on the entrepreneurial ecosystem.  Last year, the GEW Leadership partnered with some of world-leading entrepreneurship scholars from US, UK and Europe to develop the Global Entrepreneurship Index (GEI) that tracks the quality of the business ecosystem of a country. The GEI measures three building blocks of entrepreneurship, which are attitudes, abilities and aspirations. These three components are further analyzed and broken down into the fourteen pillars of entrepreneurship.

For example, the entrepreneurial attitudes component attempts to measure how much business opportunities are available in the country given the market size. How developed are the startup skills of young entrepreneurs? How is the attitude of the entrepreneurs toward risk? What is the level of networking skills of entrepreneurs? How is entrepreneurship viewed as career choice in the country?

The entrepreneurial abilities component, on the other hand, looks into the following: How motivated are prospective founders to start up a business? What is the capability of the country to absorb new technology? What is the general educational background of the startup community? What is the level of competition in the country?

Finally, the entrepreneurial aspirations component seeks to measure the ability of the country to innovate new products. How much high growth companies are in the system that employ 10 people and intend to grow the business by over 50 percent  in five years? How globalized is the business sector? How accessible is funding for startup ventures? The GEI is computed by getting the average index of the three components. The Philippines ranked 91st out of 132 countries this year, up from last year’s rank of 95th place. United States led the top rank in the list while African country, Chad placed at the bottom.

The Philippines also improved its ranking among Asia-Pacific countries at 13th place this year out of 21 countries, up from 15th place last year. Australia led the top rank in the group while Bangladesh got the last place. Among the pillars of entrepreneurship, the Philippines has notable improvements from its ratings on risk capital and opportunity startup. This shows that there is higher motivation among young people to start up a business and the flow of funding from business angels, incubators and venture capital has also improved.

However, despite all the positive developments, technology absorption and internalization pillars remain low. In fact, it has worsened a bit from last year. The ability to absorb newer technology by different sectors in the economy and the globalization of local apps have been somewhat slow, thereby impeding the development of the local startup industry.

YES has been doing its share in expanding the startup community by raising the standard of competitiveness among local startups. Last Aug. 8, YES in partnership with Ye! Group of Netherlands successfully launched the Startup Summit, which showcased national startup competition where the top 10 winners were awarded scholarship training to Amsterdam. This December, YES is also hosting the national finals competition for USA-based 1776 Challenge Cup where the winner will represent the Philippines to regional finals in Seoul, Korea. This year’s GEW campaign would not be successful without the generous support of YES partners namely Joe Maristela of Katalyst.ph, Juan Paolo dela Vega and Jenn Lim of YES National, Matt Jaeggi and Ces Rondario of Impact Hub Manila, and all the members and officers of YES chapters.

YES also would like to thank the statement of support given by our government leaders led by Vice President Jejomar Binay, former Secretary Mar Roxas, Senators Grace Poe, Chiz Escudero and Bam Aquino on this special occasion. Learn something new about starting up a business this week. Find a problem to solve. Come up with an idea on how to solve it by innovating a product or service.  Validate your idea with friends and colleagues. Test your business model if it is something you can scale up. Get a mentor who can guide you by networking with entrepreneurs. Make a better world for everyone by becoming an entrepreneur. Happy Global Entrepreneurship Week!

(Henry Ong is Director of the Young Entrepreneur Society, the official host of the Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) for the Philippines. To request for copy of the GEI report, please email [email protected] or text <name><e-mail> <GEW> at 0917-9689774.)