The notion of inclusive entrepreneurship covers: women, youth, migrants and long term unemployed people. Some people believe that ethnic minorities, refugees, mid-career transition or ageing people should be added to this list. Others believe that specific considerations have to be given to rural or remote regions.

Info: https://betterentrepreneurship.eu/

Why local policy makers and intermediary organisations should look more carefully to inclusive entrepreneurship? Entrepreneurship is important as it is a mean to revitalise the economy of local areas. It is worth to recall from time to time that Entrepreneurship is the first engine to avoid economic and administrative deserts. There are a lot, even if they are anecdotal in terms of macro-economic indicators that village and small town revival started because one or a few entrepreneurs have started a new business in that area. Sometimes the starting point was in relation with handcraft, culture or local traditions. This also shows that local policy makers have to take care of all would-be entrepreneur types and not only of the innovative fast growing ones.

There are at least 5 reasons why policy makers, managers of intermediary organisations and NGOs should support entrepreneurship:

1. innovation in all its forms not the only technology one,
2. jobs creation even if it will be the only one of the entrepreneur himself or herself,
3. competition new comers always induce a reaction, it is even good if businesses having a monopoly or a higher comfort zone are challenged or even failed at the end of the day,
4. acceleration of change: social or cultural with equal opportunity to become an entrepreneur,
5. introduction of fresh blood in the ecosystem or the community life.

What are the links between local economic development and inclusive entrepreneurship? The 5 target groups can contribute to the local economy. Indeed:

1. Migrants represent an important pool of potential entrepreneurs, but can face, as other more vulnerable groups, specifically legal, cultural and linguistic obstacles;
2. Women constitute 52% of the total European population, but only one-third of the self-employed or of all business starters in the EU. Based on the needs expressed by women entrepreneurs, the Commission has encouraged networking and exchanges of good practices, as well as initiatives that help women build confidence in their abilities;
3. Supporting young entrepreneurs can avoid a brain drain and unemployment and is therefore a kind of insurance against the erosion of the local socio-economic system;
4. Given the significant number of unemployed people, entrepreneurship support schemes can be put in place to encourage business creation as a route out of unemployment.
5. Social entrepreneurship can provide solutions to a lot of aspirations in the field of climate change as well as better proximity services.

How to use the tool at regional/local level? The starting point is to identify between 10 and 15 representatives of key organizations who deals with various kinds of support to entrepreneurs (public authorities intermediary organisations, universities and researchers, stakeholder associations,…). The second step is to create and ad hoc user group on the OECD dedicated platform and ask those representatives to take up to one hour of their time to fill in the online questionnaire. The platform will automatically generate aggregated a report providing information for each of the questions. The last step will be to organise a small workshop to discuss the results and to identify measures to upgrade the support services currently in place. As the tool is based on the perception of participants it does not require searching for data (budget, resources allocation, number of beneficiaries, costs per intervention, return on investment) regarding the implementation of the strategy.

Why stakeholders should use the tool? The main interesting resultis a candid assessment of their perception regarding the effectiveness of the supports and so a good basis to review of the ingredients of the current policy, the relevance of the segmentation or its implementing measures.

How the results look like? The platform generates aggregated information in the form of a spider and bar graphs as well as a written reportdetailing the average score for each question. The two following graphs illustrate the result of a real exercise organised at a city level for the support given to youth and women entrepreneurship. The exercise is in line as a followed up of the debates regarding the design of a Smart City strategy.

It is interesting to notice that the perception shows a more tailored environment to support youth entrepreneurship than for women. This finding is explained by a lower score for the different parameters and a poor score for the strategy related to the women ecosystem. The differences in perception were explained during the meeting by the facts that there are more schemes and support organisations supporting youth entrepreneurship and that the supports for women are perceived as too generic. The later do not tackle the real needs and specific problems faced by women (cultural persistent clichés and family issues for solo entrepreneurs).

Which lessons drawn from the 3 exercises conduct, so far with EURADA friends?

• Every participant found that it was a useful exercise insofar that the tool provides a good opportunity to look to the issue from a different point of view than the classical monitoring,
• Most of participants acknowledge and welcome the public supports in favour of entrepreneurship but there is a shared view that they do not fully reach their expectations. This is due to the fact that the way these support schemes are implemented do not always match the entrepreneurs' expectations or those of support providers and have unnecessary paperwork to be filled in before and after they apply for the support,
• The discussion led to identify small and easy to implement measures to support locally would-be entrepreneur and newly created businesses,
• Woman entrepreneurs perceived the supports schemes as too generic and not enough designed to solve their specific needs,
• Service providers regret a too fragmented implementation approach and sometimes an unpredictable launch of the next generation of calls or a lack of segmentation of the potential beneficiaries,
• Young entrepreneurs face difficulties to access a second round of external funding and to be coached by business developers,
• Cultural barriers including, at the family level and clichés are still predominant for women would be entrepreneurs,
• Some participants asked to pay attention to the wording used to promote entrepreneurship. For instance, to consider women entrepreneurs as a "vulnerable group" is not very rewarding.

Are you interested on using this tool? Do not hesitate to contact the founder and former Director of EURADA Mr. Christian Saublens at 00 32 477 44 84 56 or Christian.saublens@gmail.com