In the picture Ms. Ivanka Trump, advisor of U.S. President Donald Trump.
By Guido Lanfranchi.
After two and a half hectic, intensive days, the Global Entrepreneurship Summit, held in The Hague, drew to an end. Yet, the follow-up of the Summit is expected to be extensive, with the development of new partnership and initiatives established during the gathering.
On June 5th, the 9th edition of the Global Entrepreneurship Summit, co-organized by the Netherlands and the United States in The Hague, eventually arrived at its conclusion. After two and a half days full of meetings, speeches, workshops, and initiatives, the participants gathered at the World Forum in Scheveningen for the closing ceremony. The ceremony featured high-level keynote speakers, including Ms. Ivanka Trump, daughter advisor of U.S. President Donald Trump, Mr. Michael Kratsios, Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer, and Ms. Sigrid Kaag, Dutch Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation.
The ceremony marked the end of a massive gathering, which brought together over a thousand talented entrepreneurs from over 140 countries, more than 300 large scale investors, and a host of government leaders. The Summit’s aim was to provide support to entrepreneurs at a global level.
Among the attendees, one could find extremely different profiles. There were delegations representing large groups of entrepreneurs, such as Entrepreneurs Organization, a network of 13,000 entrepreneurs from 57 different countries. At the same time, there were also very specialized company, such as AntiRadical Therapeutics LLC, a U.S. based business proposing an innovative drug for treatment of cancer and brain injuries.
Commenting on the Summit, Ambassador Maureen Cormack, Senior Advisor for the U.S. Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs on the GES, praised the cooperation between the U.S. and the Netherlands in organizing the event. She stressed how, for the first time, the organizers had “worked really hard to recruit entrepreneurs who are investment ready, who have scalable enterprises”, hoping to match them with “a broad range of investors”.
The Summit has led to a large number of deliverables. Among them, the Water Security Grand Challenge, aimed at promoting the creation of transformational technology to “meet the global need for safe, secure and affordable water; the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative, supported by Ms. Trump and MasterCard CEO Ajaypal Singh Banga, and aimed at economically empower 50 million women across the developing world by 2025; and the Global Innovation through Science and Technology initiative, dedicated to matching top science and technology entrepreneurs from emerging economies with innovators in the U.S.
All these initiatives are aimed at supporting entrepreneurs all over the world, both inside and outside the United States. Ambassador Cormack explained that the U.S. sees entrepreneurship “as a way for the global economy to rise”. In around ten months – she announced – the U.S. plans to do a survey to analyze the GES’ follow-up. This will be a crucial test for analyzing what can be achieved through the Summit, and whether the gathering will live up to its key motto: The Future Now.
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Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) 2019, June 3-5 in The Hague. (GES photo by Paul Barendregt/Public Domain).
