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Estonian residents see entrepreneurship as an attractive career choice!

There is an important increase in the number of Estonians who think that the conditions in Estonia favour setting up a business, while fear of failure has decreased. (by Global Entrepreneurship Monitor study)

Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) is a study that analyses entrepreneurship in different countries and regions; the latest study shows increased entrepreneurial activity around the world. “The crucial motivation in starting a business is personal example, such as personally knowing an entrepreneur. Other important factors include faith in one’s knowledge and skills to make it as an entrepreneur, and an identified business opportunity or idea. Less important factors include the improved social status as an entrepreneur, and the attention given to entrepreneurship in the society,” said Head of the Foresight Centre Tea Danilov, commenting the conclusions of the study

Over the last five years, the early-stage entrepreneurship activity (TEA) rate (the prevalence rate of individuals who have taken steps to start a new company, or have been entrepreneurs for up to 42 months) has increased from 14 % to 19 % in Estonia. Among the innovation-based countries – as the study classifies Estonia – this is a very high rate. Last year, the European TEA index was 8.1 %, and has remained around this mark for the past five years. The TEA index is 14.2 % in Latvia, 7.3 % in Sweden, and 5.3 % in Germany. Early-stage entrepreneurship has grown fairly equally among men and women, which is why the percentage of women has not changed over the past three years.

A typical early-stage entrepreneur in Estonia is a male under 45 years of age who identifies a business opportunity and considers his knowledge and skills good enough to become an entrepreneur. “We could ask whether men are actually more business savvy, or just more confident. It is a positive sign that most companies are founded in Estonia on the basis of business opportunities (76 %); only around one in four (24 %) entrepreneurs are forced to start a business to earn a living. This pattern favours innovation and ambition to grow,” Danilov summarised.

The study shows that entrepreneurship activity in Estonia would benefit further if the 45+ age group would be encouraged to become entrepreneurs, people would be prompted to share their personal entrepreneurship experiences, young people would be taught entrepreneurial skills, and entrepreneurship would be emphasised as a positive career choice.

All budding entrepreneurs fear failure, but the last five years have shown a change in the attitude of the Estonians in this respect. “The change in the entrepreneurship culture is characterised by indicators such as seeing entrepreneurship as a successful career choice, the high status of entrepreneurs in the society, and the high media attention to entrepreneurship,” Danilov explained.

The main drawback highlighted by the analysts is that the starting entrepreneurs are not planning to create as many jobs as earlier. Although the global report underlines this as a problem, Estonia has not seen the negative effects so far; however, in light of the trends in the labour market, the number of jobs may still fall because the number of self-employed individuals is growing.

The study shows that an increasing number of Estonians personally know an entrepreneur – this percentage has grown from 31% to 39% over the last five years. The number of people who feel that they do not have the knowledge and skills necessary for entrepreneurship is falling; however, self-doubters still make up 50 % of the population.

Over the last five years, people are increasingly viewing entrepreneurship as a positive career choice – in 2017, half of the 18–64 year olds felt that. The percentage of those who consider entrepreneurs as high status members of the society has remained around 60–65 %.

Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) is an annual study that analyses and compares entrepreneurship activity and attitudes. The study involves over 50 countries around the world; Estonia has been included since 2012.

Facts about early-stage entrepreneurial activity in Estonia in 2012–2017 according to GEM study (PDF, 81 kB)

GMS 2017/2018

See more on GEM 2018 / 2019 Global Report

References

Parliament of Estonia site

Photo by Global Entrepreneur Monitor on GEM GLOBAL REPORT

The Platform Design Toolkit 2.0

The new tool has been published to assist entrepreneurs and organizations to look at business and activities, to design strategies, products and organizations “as a platform.”

As a synthesis of different definitions, developers say that platforms are scalable collaboration agreements powered by technologies: it’s not easy to differentiate between a technology, a strategy or an organization itself; at the end, everything shapes into seeing platform thinking a way to organize value creation in a particular ecosystem.

Platform thinking is a whole new way to look at organizations or processes or even a way to think how a place or a community should work — as applying platform thinking to cities or towns policies and services.

Platforms are winning because two critical technological shifts are happening: first, there is a growing potential in every individual or small enterprise, second – now it much more easy to connect and coordinate. These changes transformed the optimal shape of a company, product or strategy from the industrial “pipeline” (and bureaucracy) to the network.

It’s made of:

the Ecosystem Canvas for mapping all entities and roles in the ecosystem you are trying to mobilize;
the Entity Portrait for analyzing the entities individual context (potential, performance pressures, goals and gains sought);
the Motivations Matrix and Transactions Board to first let emerge and then consolidate the transactions engine (interactive marketplace);
the Learning Engine canvas (formerly Experience Learning canvas) to design the learning engine (the core of the platform proposition);
the Platform Experience canvas to design ecosystem journeys and business models featured in your strategy;
the Minimum Viable Platform canvas to help you design, and prototype your validation strategy.

The Platform Design Toolkit is based on the tradition of Business Modeling, Service Design Thinking and Lean Thinking (including concepts from Customer Development, the Lean Startup, the work of Lean Startup Machine on validation, etc…) and provides a unified view, optimized for Platforms and Ecosystems, of all these relevant tools and approaches.

Summer camp on social entrepreneurship in Lithuania

For the 4th time already an annual summer camp on social entrepreneurship took place in Antaliepte – a small Lithuanian town nearby Latvian border in August 22-23.

Over 200 participants took part in the traditional summer camp BIZZZ ’15. The main topic of this year camp was sharing economy. During the course of two days participants have been not only listening to inspiring presentations, but also attending workshops and doing hands on work in repurposing surrounding area.

Our project partner from Lithuania – Mindaugas Danys was sharing his experience and ideas as well as introducing the Baltic SE Network to participants.

More information about the summer camp is here: www.socialinisverslas.lt

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