Many governments use entrepreneurship research in a strategic way to create policies and launch programs. Case in point is how the country of Colombia is leveraging research from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor.
Daniel Oviedo, Chief Statistician of Colombia at the National Statistics Office of Colombia, shared the following on a GEM webinar held in July 2020: “Since 2006, we have continuous information from Colombia that has been reported and has been extracted from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. This is an important database that can be very helpful in order to address the main challenges of entrepreneurship in our country.”
Oviedo pointed out that as part of Colombia’s national development plan, there are three main development agenda areas – the institutional framework, the entrepreneurial ecosystem and equality.
“Entrepreneurship is significant in addressing our development agenda because in Colombia, a significant part of our entrepreneurship is linked to informality,” he said.
The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean recently defined four main traps facing Latin American countries in their development: the productivity trap, the institutional trap, the social vulnerability trap and the environmental trap.
“Entrepreneurship is at the core of solving the productivity trap and the social vulnerability trap,” explained Oviedo. “With good quality entrepreneurship in our country, we can solve the vulnerability that many of the entrepreneurs are facing due to informality, while at the same time allow entrepreneurship to foster innovation. That's why we believe that the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s resources that have been developed in our country can be very useful in order to contribute to this agenda and to foster entrepreneurship, that generates innovation.”
COVID-19 presents particular challenges for Colombian entrepreneurs, particular informal ones who are at risk of being invisible.
“In the midst of COVID-19, we want to target public policy that promotes innovation,” concluded Oviedo. “This is something very difficult. And that's why the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor that provides an individual survey of entrepreneurs could be very useful in order to locate and to identify this population.”
Access this segment of Daniel Oviedo from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor webinar.