The Ministry of SMEs and Startups launched this year’s biggest startup festival in South Korea, the COMEUP 2020, from November 19-21. The three-day event aims to connect startups and business ventures under the theme “Meet the Future – Post Pandemic.”
The event’s first day featured four keynote speeches divided into two in the morning and two in the afternoon session. The topics included COVID-19 and Startups, startup policies, digital healthcare, and climate change.
Politics: Renewal Through Innovation: Startup and Entrepreneurship Policy Post COVID-19
OECD Director Lamia kamal-Chaoui gave a speech focused primarily on how public policies during and post-COVID could help startups and companies succeed and share South Korea’s vision of developing startups into a positive force for recovery and renewal.
Since the pandemic, the OECD continuously monitors the crisis’s impact on SMEs and startups in all OECD-member and non-member countries. At the outset, one-fifth of SMEs and startups were at risk of failure within three months of the lockdown measures. Businesses in many countries had to close down entirely, and those who manage to remain open faced significant difficulty through disrupted supply chains and changes in consumption.
Guidelines to Support SMEs and Startups
According to Lamai, there are three main guidelines governments and institutions could use to support startups and entrepreneurship and sustain their recovery:
- Boost startup policy. In the current environment, the existing scale of startup policy in many countries is insufficient to support startups properly. Governments would need to go much farther to promote entrepreneurship in all sectors, from hi-tech manufacturing to more traditional services to secure job reach recovery. This means creating market frameworks and institutions to support the emergence of all types of firms; boosting efforts to promote entrepreneurship as a positive choice; investing in business leadership management and digital skills; and creating and expanding entrepreneurs’ networks to promote learning and sharing of ideas.
- Startup policy that targets businesses that could reshape the economy. Policymakers should reserve their intensive financial support for those companies with the greatest potential to contribute to the economy and society positively. Startups that are innovative and green and with a positive social mission such as social enterprises.
- Place-sensitive government actions. The OECD’s work in local entrepreneurial ecosystems demonstrates how much regional conditions matter for startups and scale-up entrepreneurs. It is in cities and regions where entrepreneurs form their networks and attract talent. Local partners bring the knowledge, resources, and energy to design a startup support system that would work in their setting.
Quoting Winston Churchill, OECD Director Lamia Kamal-Chaoui, said, “Never let a good crisis to waste.”
Amid this crisis, startups hold the key to embrace new business models, accelerate digital transformation, and develop a more inclusive and sustainable economy. In short, an opportunity to build back better.
Visit COMEUP 2020 website to view the event’s programs. https://www.kcomeup.com/prog/program-main-event.jsp?
