School of Management Fribourg (HEG-FR)
Professor Raphaël Gaudart joined the Swiss Global Entrepreneurship Monitor team back in 2015. One particular finding stood out for him: Switzerland was lagging behind other peer economies with regard to entrepreneurship education in primary schools.
Gaudart decided he would proactively address this concern by launching a summer entrepreneurship camp for teenagers in Fribourg. He identified a sponsor — the Fribourg Canton Chamber of Commerce — which made it possible for 17 teenagers to go through a week-long immersion into the world entrepreneurship.
“ADOpreneurs” was launched in July 2016, also in partnership with the Engineering School and the Innovation Lab Fribourg. It has been running every year since (with the exceptions of 2020 and 2021 due to COVID-19). Said Gaudart:
“ADOpreneurs was the opportunity for these young people to immerse themselves in the practical world of entrepreneurship since they had to create from A to Z a small enterprise.”
The students meet with entrepreneurs, visit different companies (including Google’s offices in Zurich) and take part in various interactive activities related to entrepreneurship, such as brainstorming and creativity sessions. They work on creating a prototype for a business and designing a basic website to introduce their new ideas. They also learn the art of storytelling, finding the right formula for allocating roles in a company, defining a budget and looking for potential partners.
The week culminates with a launch event in which the teenagers present their projects to parents, professors and representatives from the different organizations involved with ADOpreneurs. According to Marie, a former participant:
“It’s great to carry out a project and get help and guidance from entrepreneurs and professionals.”
Timon, another former participant, added:
“It was fun, varied but also educational. As an entrepreneur you have a lot of freedom but you also have to think about a lot of things.”
THE REAL WORLD BEHIND THE
DATA . . .
Thank you to the School of Management Fribourg (HEG-FR), one of our report sponsors, for providing this material and helping to put our data in a real-world context.
public procurement opportunities, and less access to financing compared to men.
Figure 9.4 shows expert scores for their perceptions of the level of support for women entrepreneurs, and their access to the resources necessary to run a new and growing business.
This time the perceptions are very different, and there is little correlation in the same economy between the score for support and the score for access to resources.35 Of the 49 economies, only 11 scored as satisfactory in terms of support for women entrepreneurs (one from Level C, four from Level B and six from Level A), whereas 27 scored satisfactory for women entrepreneurs having similar access to resources compared to men (seven Level C, seven Level B and 13 Level A).
In 39 of these economies, the score for access to resources exceeded the score for support.
Economies appear to have made much more progress in ensuring equal access to resources
than they have in providing the support (often social) that some women need to run their businesses. The highest expert scores for
perceived support for women entrepreneurs were in the United Arab Emirates, India and Saudi Arabia, with the lowest scores in Iran, Cyprus and Brazil. Indeed, there were far too many economies with poor scores for social support of women entrepreneurs, with 22 of the 49 economies scoring 3.5 or less, including three from Level A (Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States), 11 from Level B and eight from Level C. There is considerable room for improvement across the board.
The perceived access to resources for women entrepreneurs relative to men was rather better, not only with more high scores but with many fewer low ones. Only two economies scored less than 3.5 (Oman and Ukraine), although both Spain and Slovenia were close.
35 The correlation coefficient is 0.117.
FIGURE 9.4 National expert scores for the perceived social support for women entrepreneurs, and their relative access to the resources necessary to start and run their businesses Source: GEM National Expert Survey, 2023
National expert score
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Iran Brazil Mexico Venezuela Morocco Guatemala Ecuador Colombia Jordan South Africa Thailand China (PRC) Ukraine India Cyprus Israel Japan Greece Slovak Republic Poland Spain Croatia Chile Romania Argentina Puerto Rico Uruguay Hungary Panama Estonia Oman Latvia Lithuania Italy United Kingdom United States Germany Luxembourg Switzerland Canada France Netherlands Republic of Korea Slovenia Norway Qatar Sweden Saudi Arabia United Arab Emirates
Support Resources
Level B
Level C Level A
9.8 WHAT ARE THE POLICY IMPLICATIONS OF THIS CHAPTER?
If an EFC score of 5 or more is regarded as sufficient or satisfactory, two economies had sufficient scores for all their EFCs in 2023: the United Arab Emirates and the Netherlands.
Iran, a consistent supporter of both GEM and entrepreneurship, scored as unsatisfactory for all of its EFCs. The GEM NES has provided many examples of economies that have improved their EFCs over several years: Oman is a recent example. There may be opportunities for Iran to draw inspiration from some of these examples.
To examine whether national entrepreneurial environments had recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic, EFC scores in 2023 were compared to 2021. For nine of the 13 EFCs, many more economies had reductions in their score than had increases, probably exacerbated by the withdrawal of pandemic-related government business support schemes and by the war in Ukraine and its impacts on energy prices pushing up inflation. Spain, Iran, Israel and Norway had the most severe declines in EFC scores. These economies in particular need to consider very carefully what support they can offer new businesses.
On a brighter note, scores for the two educational EFCs were more likely to have increased than decreased since 2021. Successive GEM Global Reports have called for improvements in these areas, so this change is welcome.
However, despite this general increase, there were still five economies whose score for Entrepreneurial Education at School had declined by more than a quarter since 2021:
Cyprus, Norway, Israel, Spain and Venezuela.
These economies in particular need to be aware that many new businesses may never come to fruition because a generation of schoolchildren grew up unaware that starting a business was a possibility.
Despite these changes, it is difficult to see national entrepreneurial environments overall as having recovered from the impacts of the
pandemic. In particular, many governments may need to take steps to support new businesses through their policies and
programs if these environments are to recover fully. This conclusion is further supported by the evidence that many more economies saw their overall entrepreneurial environment score (the NECI) fall in 2023 than saw an increase.
The United Arab Emirates retained (and extended) its position at the top of the NECI league table, scoring highest of all 49 economies in 12 of the 13 EFCs. Other Gulf economies also improved their NECI scores, as did India, China and Lithuania. However, a handful of well-developed, high-income economies in Europe and North America saw their NECI scores slip from sufficient to less than sufficient in 2023, including Canada, the United States, Sweden, Norway and Germany. It should be chastening to their respective governments that these entrepreneurial environments have been allowed to deteriorate to this extent, which may prove a challenge to their future prosperity. Improving the entrepreneurial environment can be a long and slow process, and these economies need to begin to reverse this decline now.
Economic performance, good environmental practices and good sustainability practices turn out to be complementary rather than competing priorities, with national experts perceiving high degrees of prioritization for each of these in many economies. However, national experts see women entrepreneurs in many economies as struggling to get the social support they need to run their businesses, reaching satisfactory levels in just 10 of the 49 economies. Some Gulf economies have made significant improvements in this area, and other economies may have a lot to learn from them about the necessary actions to turn their own situation around. There is much more favourable evidence that women were able to access the appropriate resources to start and grow their businesses as well as men, reaching satisfactory levels or better in 28 economies.