GEN President’s Contribution

Jonathan Ortmans, president of GEN
Jonathan Ortmans, president of GEN

 

The Global Entrepreneurship Congress (GEC), which celebrates its eighth anniversary this year, has strived to contribute to the establishment and enrichment of an entrepreneurship ecosystem for accelerating innovation and economic growth. As a result, the GEC has turned into an annual international conference that has no less than 160 countries around the world as its members. The Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN), which plans and hosts the conference, is currently a place where a number of entrepreneurs, investors, researchers and politicians are finding and supporting startups based on exchange and cooperation and trying to realize a creative economy of added value creation based on innovation.

The GEN aims to fulfill four purposes via the GEC held in every March. The first one is inspiration. In other words, this is to motivate the youth so that they can achieve their dreams by means of startup instead of existing types of jobs while providing information on entrepreneurial activities they need. The second one is a clear goal regarding connection, that is, expansion of networks based on cultural and academic connection beyond national boundaries and interconnection of these networks. The third one is the organization’s role as a mentor. It is trying to improvement an environment of idea and experience sharing in all the stages ranging from brainstorming to actual business establishment. The other one is engagement, that is, preparation of more effective and comprehensive platforms for entrepreneurial ecosystem development. These platforms cover every detail required for supporting and assisting in the growth of startups, such as research and investigation and public policy coordination.

At this time, the GEN presents the Global Entrepreneurship Congress Plus (GEC+) as an event associated with the GEC for achieving these purposes. The GEC+ is a conference in which global entrepreneurship experts meet to share their opinions and solutions to key issues in an in-depth way. The first GEC+ is to take place in Daegu City, South Korea.

The main topic of the GEC+ DAEGU is entrepreneurship education that forms the basis of startups’ success. A large number of entrepreneurship education experts from all around the world will participate in the occasion to have in-depth discussions and come up with various insights related to better methods for entrepreneurship education. The discussions will focus on case studies by county and I believe the advanced entrepreneurship education methodologies presented there will attract the interest of many people.

Knowledge and entrepreneurship startups and pre-startups are in need of can be collected both online and via close international networks. In this context, education experts and startup supporters around the world are currently striving to provide information helpful for them based on knowledge-based learning and expert networks.

This year’s GEC+ to be held in Daegu City, which is home to one of the most powerful Centers for Creative Economy & Innovation in South Korea, will make an opportunity for the enhancement of international cooperation and exchange for the establishment of a better entrepreneurship ecosystem by letting the world know about the entrepreneurship ecosystem of the city as a core of creative economy and helping experts share their research on entrepreneurship. 

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