Global Entrepreneurship Week starts today. This event was started by the Kauffman Foundation, leading champions of entrepreneurship and education, and Make Your Mark, a British group reaching out to young people to inspire innovation. The goal of this global initiative to inspire young people to embrace innovation, imagination and creativity. They want millions to join a growing movement of entrepreneurial people, to generate new ideas and to seek better ways of doing things. Events are taking place around the world this week.
During my recent visits to Singapore and Mexico, I’ve been inspired by the culture of innovation that I’ve encountered. Singapore excels in advanced technology and a powerful approaches to advancing and funding R&D that will create leadership in targeted areas such as biotech and data mining. Mexico has an amazing university system with some wonderful centers for R&D, but what impressed me most is the culture of innovation at the personal level, where individuals are ready to go the extra mile to create success and find better ways of doing things. If this mindset can be fortified and amplified with governmental support and vision, Mexico could become a real leader in global innovation. Innovation can come from anywhere across the globe, but each nation has its own limitations and challenges in terms of regulations, taxation, educational support, infrastructure, capital, markets, and talent. Each nation should have a high-level commission exploring the challenges of innovation at the personal level (one of the key issues we explore in Conquering Innovation Fatigue) to ensure that the voice of the innovator is heard and unintended consequences of government policy are not choking innovation success.