Insights on Entrepreneurship, SMEs, Tourism, Regions and Cities
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and entrepreneurs were hit extremely hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. To invest in growth and greening and play a full part in the recovery, we need to enable them to tap into alternative financial instruments.
Recent research suggests that women-founded businesses perform better over time and deliver higher revenue – more than twice as much per dollar invested – than men-founded businesses. In addition, women-founded start-up teams create more jobs for women – they employ 2.5 times more women than all-male start-up teams.
“scale up” account for the majority of new jobs in the economy. These firms can play a key role in the recovery. However, scaling up brings new challenges.
Every year the city of Brussels imports over 60 000 tons of wood, when the wood could be sourced from the Sonian Forest just outside the city. Instead, most of the wood sourced from the forest is exported to Asia to be processed and sent back as finished products. The Sonian Wood Coop was launched in 2019 to change this dynamic.
Greening can clearly save costs: improving energy efficiency in SMEs can Iead to cost savings by reducing their energy demand by 10- 30%. Beyond such cost benefits, improved energy efficiency can strengthen small-business resilience by reducing exposure to energy-price volatility and uncertainty, and improve product quality and safety.
NACCE and OECD share a common goal in finding solutions to a range of social, economic, and environmental challenges. In this podcast, they highlight the importance of collaboration and entrepreneurial mindset as core skills to address pandemic challenges at the personal and community levels.
The success story of Fine Food Group looks different from the glitzy high-tech start-ups featured in business magazines or in investment blogs. The OECD report Understanding Firm Growth: Helping SMEs Scale Up shows that its storyis nonetheless much more representative of a typical scaler than that of a high-tech start-up.
Es are the beating heart of the global economy. In Europe alone, there are 24 million small businesses, employing a total of 95 million people and generating €4 trillion a year. And yet, SMEs are still behind their larger counterparts in the integration of the digital tools that they need to increase productivity, scale-up and innovate.