USIP Scaling Peace Tech and GEM 2016 Launch

On Thursday, KolCo’s Managing Director, Steven Koltai, spoke to an overflow audience at the United States Institute of Peace’s Scale Peach Tech event. He was joined at the event by entrepreneurs and industry leaders, including Jack Dangermond, Founder and CEO of the mapping software and GIS applications giant, Esri; and Robin Chase, sharing economy pioneer and founder of ZipCar.

On Friday, February 5, Steven traveled to Boston’s historic Omni Parker House, where he spoke at the launch event for the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s 2015/2016 Global Report. Steven was in attendance to participate in the panel discussion, “Advancing the Impact of Entrepreneurship Worldwide: Priorities and Actions.”

The event brought together researchers from dozens of countries in a conversation focused on identifying best practices for the international economic development community, and next steps for GEM’s growing academic entrepreneurship policy-focused research community.

Steven was joined on the panel by Ganesh Rasagam, Director, World Bank’s InfoDev (Entrepreneurship and Innovation Practice); Chantal Carpentier, Chief, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD); and, Peter Gratzke, Project Manager of Investors Industries, the World Economic Forum (WEF).

For many in attendance, the event represented an opportunity to open a conversation between the research community, the funding community, and the on-the-ground practitioners – a unique and valuable perspective lent by KolCo’s experience on the front lines of entrepreneurship development.

For Steven, perhaps the key distinction needing to be made – and a point the conversation returned to several times – is that between no-tech, low-tech, and high-tech entrepreneurship:

The panel also discussed the ongoing efforts, spearheaded by UNCTAD, to devise new indicators that are in alignment with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals; the World Bank Group’s rethinking of economic development priorities, which will see increased focus on access to finance, to global supply chains, to the digital and innovation economy, and to talent across each of those silos; and, the WEF’s efforts to help governments understand and better meet the needs of disruptive entrepreneurs.