Entrepreneurship Abroad: Cultural and International Perspectives and Challenges
by Betty Tsakarestou
Summary
In this chapter, we explore international perspectives in entrepreneurship, how the startup “fever” captured the minds and souls of innovators across Europe and around the globe, and how leading cities are growing as startup and innovation ecosystems.
While this section is titled entrepreneurship abroad, the preliminary chapter focuses on entrepreneurship in Europe. (This chapter will be expanded to other continents for Version 2.)
We also look into how Silicon Valley has provided the prototype of scalable success and startup ecosystems which others in the world have tried either to differentiate from or emulate. This U.S. West Coast model built a world-leading innovation ecosystem attracting talent, funding, and resources.
Media innovation and entrepreneurship initiatives and startups are presented in the context of the broader global focus on entrepreneurs leading both change and solutions to global and local challenges that impact twenty-first-century interconnected societies.
Activities will help you to take the lead in implementing and learning more from your own experience and experimentation.
Learning Objectives
- Gain a wider global perspective of entrepreneurship outside the U.S., with a focus in Europe.
- Learn about the key structural and cultural drivers that help or create barriers to building successful startup cities-based ecosystems around the world, with a focus on the European tech-startup scene.
- Learn the key players and stakeholders shaping and scaling up startup ecosystems across Europe.
- Explore what it takes to build an entrepreneurial mindset in regions with a weak enterprising culture.
- Learn current challenges and dilemmas that face different regions and cities in the world as they choose between inventing their own approaches to entrepreneurship or trying to emulate the Silicon Valley model.
Inside this Chapter
- Entrepreneurship Abroad: Cultural and International Perspectives and Challenges
- From the Field: Technology and Media Entrepreneurship in China, by Hodan Osman
- From the Field: Addis Insight, A Niche Site for the Ethiopian Diaspora, by Abel Asrat and Rediat Belehu
- A Short History of Silicon Valley, by Francine Hardaway
Betty Tsakarestou, Ph.D., is assistant professor and head of the advertising and public relations lab at Panteion University, in Athens, Greece. She is co-initiator of Connecting Cities,[1] an exchange scholar of Study of U.S. Institutes (SUSI) on Journalism and Media at Ohio University (2015), branding officer and European co-liaison of the International Communication Division of The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) and a Startup Weekend on Entrepreneurial Journalism[2] organizer. Reach her on Twitter at @tsakarestou.
- Connecting Cities, https://medium.com/connecting-cities. ↵
- Startup Weekend Entrepreneurial Journalism Athens Greece, https://medium.com/startup-weekend-entrepreneurial-journalism-athens. ↵
