Global Entrepreneurship Week: "Unleash Your Ideas"

The 2nd annual Global Entrepreneurship Week was launched yesterday:

"From November 16-22, Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) will connect young people everywhere through local, national, and global activities designed to help them explore their potential as self-starters and innovators. Students, educators, entrepreneurs, business leaders, employees, non-profit leaders, government officials and many others will participate in a range of activities, from online to face-to-face, and from large-scale competitions and events to intimate networking gatherings."

GEW has four goals (from their web site):

* Inspire. We introduce entrepreneurship to young people under the age of thirty who otherwise might not have considered it as a career path.
* Connect. We network young people and organisations across national boundaries to discover new ideas at the intersection of cultures and disciplines.
* Mentor. We enlist active and inspiring entrepreneurs around the world to coach and mentor the next generation of enterprise talent as they pursue their dreams.
* Engage. We demonstrate to opinion leaders and policymakers how entrepreneurship is central to a nation's economic health and culture, and give them the opportunity to learn about each other's entrepreneurial policies and practices.

Pretty cool goals, if you ask me.

Here's a 5-minute video about Global Entrepreneurship Week:



Of particular interest to readers of the green skeptic is the Global Cleantech Open competition, which solicited ideas from around the world, "anything from revolutionary ways to generate clean energy, to better ways to filter water, to ideas about how governmental policies around climate change can foster new businesses."

Winners will be announced tonight at a gala reception in San Francisco: Gala

There are many events around the world marking Global Entrepreneurship Week, and other events that are happening coincidentally, such a Philly Startup Leaders' 2nd annual Founder Factory, which takes place on Thursday, November 19th at World Cafe Live.

The Founder Factory was created by Philly Startup Leaders to help foster growth of an ecosystem of entrepreneurs, mentors, angels, VCs, students, schools, and government groups in the Philadelphia area.

This week it's all about unleashing ideas.

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Global Entrepreneurship Week: Unleashing Ideas

I'm reblogging a post from Nathaniel Whittemore, the founding Director of the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University. Cool stuff.

This week is the first Global Entrepreneurship Week, a celebration of creativity, innovation, and inspiration designed to connect young people around the world and spark fires of entrepreneurship to solve big problems and create new opportunities.

Launched by Make Your Mark and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurs, the week brings together literally thousands of organizations holding events around the world. In the United Kingdom, for example, more than 600 partner organizations are hosting more than 3,000 activities.

The week is particularly focused on introducing the Millennial generation to the idea of entrepreneurship and enterprise. For example, events held yesterday included:

• a debate called "In the Current Economic Climate, Can Entrepreneurs Change the World," as a part of ChainReaction,
• a video conference about entrepreneurship and the Millennium Development Goals between Ghanian university students and California Polytech State University,
• a debate about entrepreneurship and the local environment in Porto Alegre in Brazil

I'll be posting videos and commentary all week. You can follow along here or check out some of the main sites aggregating content from around the world:

• Unleashingideas.org - the main site for Global Entrepreneurship Week, where you can see the full variety of activities happening around the world
• the Kauffman Foundation's page for GEW, which includes "Daily Dispatches" with some of the most interesting happenings
• the official Youtube Channel

Reblogged from socialentrepreneurship.change.org

Go to the original source: social entrepreneurship

More on Global Entrepreneurship Week here and here.

And a blog from Singapore: Connect the Dots

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