A common subject for discussion among both governments and investors is how to create the right environment to produce more entrepreneurs.  Last month, we saw Cameron launch ‘Tech City” in London. At about the same time, we had the NESTA report suggesting that Europe is less dynamic than the US, meaning it’s more difficult for new, innovative, companies to penetrate the established order.

Everybody knows that entrepreneurs like to think of new things and set up ventures to take them to market.  These early stage, high growth businesses are the main driver of economic growth. Despite this fact, there are very few places in the world that actually make it easy for an entrepreneur to start a company and go on to build it into a true global success story. This says to me that it is clearly very difficult to get the formula right.

To my mind, there are four main ingredients to create an ideal entrepreneurial environment:

Talent + Funding + Attitude + Government

Let’s take each one at a time:

Talent

Clearly, you need to have talented people to start and grow successful companies. This includes the talent and imagination to think of new ideas and better ways of doing things and also the talent to take on risk and turn those ideas into a successful business. I think some of this you are born with and is then further developed by working with other great entrepreneurs or by going ahead setting up a business and learning from the experience.

Funding