SA’s Contribution to the Global Entrepreneurship Week – State of Entrepreneurship Summit

by Yolandi Janse van Rensburg on 25/11/09 at 12:00 pm
No comments

Last week I was lucky enough to attend the “State of Entrepreneurship in South Africa” Summit at the FNB Conference & Learning Center as part of the Global Entrepreneurship Week.

What is the Global Entrepreneurship Week?

For one week, millions of people around the world took part in a growing movement to generate new ideas and to seek better ways of doing things. This event connected young people from different countries across six continents to help them explore their potential as self-starters and innovators. In other words, it’s getting entrepreneurial people to think big. “To turn their ideas into reality. To make their mark.”

The State of Entrepreneurship Summit in Joburg hosted by FNB and Endeavor offered us the opportunity to view a headline panel of SA’s top decision-makers and key stakeholders such as CEO of Discovery Holdings Adrian Gore, CEO at FNB commercial Iris Dempsey, and CEO of Gauteng Enterprise Propeller Hlumelo Biko. The panelists debated issues around entrepreneurship in SA such as what we’re doing right and what challenges we still have to face.

A really good definition that came up for ‘entrepreneurship’ that I really enjoyed was, “entrepreneurship is like jumping out of an airplane with a bag of silk worms and hoping they’re all overachievers.”

Next up, we moved on to the breakaway panel to discuss access to skills with GIBS. Dr Alex Antonites posed the question: “How do you attract top talent?” Here, we as a group discussed certain challenges this posed and tried to offer some solutions. Other breakaway panels covered topics such as access to capital, enterprise development and culture of entrepreneurship. These discussions were captured in a multi-authored White Paper and proposed innovative solutions to create dynamic entrepreneurial environments in SA.

Overall the Summit was useful, informative and a great contribution to the Global Entrepreneurship Week. It was definitely worthwhile!

Yolandi Janse van Rensburg writes about social media, marketing, life and, of course, cars. We say “of course” because Yolandi is nuts about anything on 4 wheels and runs Autofemme, a blog about cars. Our Ideate sub-editor is also the Heavy Chef girl at World Wide Creative. You can follow her on Twitter @Yolandi_JvR View more articles by Yolandi Janse van Rensburg.

Tags: Entrepeneurship, entrepreneurial thinking

Entrepreneurs Thinking BIG: Business resources, tips, success stories, interviews and business ideas

Ideate