Building a business friendly Europe: Change the image of entrepreneurs in Europe

During Eastern, I have been traveling to four of the ten countries that will join the EU on May 1st. Incredibly interesting trip not only for the countries we have been visiting, but also for the meetings we had in the Euro Identity Caravan that Miha Pogacnik launched. The discussions we had helped me prepare a session about the future of business in Europe I will be speaking at the World Economic Forum's European Summit end of April in Poland.

The below text is only rough notes from some of the ideas we discussed and I will try to put them in a better writing as soon as I can.

Entrepreneurs often have a bad image or no image at all in Europe.

Risk is part of their life, every day, and failure is not perceived as being part of the game. The business life of an entrepreneur is full of challenges, it took him time to find an idea and also time to make the decision to take the risk to launch it, very frequently he has left an interesting position somewhere with a good salary and created risk for his own family as well.

In most European countries, there are not enough entrepreneurs, the Financial Times rated France and other European countries as one of the last three countries in the world in number of entrepreneurs per inhabitant for example.

Nine companies created out of ten disappear during the first three years following their creation. So failure is not only something that can happen, it is actually a fact happening to most entrepreneurs.

Most Entrepreneurs who fail in Europe get criticized, do not dare to talk about it, and generally many people will tell them they should not start again because they failed.

The entrepreneurs who are successful in the US are often considered as heroes. In Europe, most of them hide themselves because success is not something you can show to the same extent, because many people around them start to become jealous.

The image of European entrepreneurs must change. They are creative, they take risks, they create jobs, they put their life and family at risk to start their businesses.

Europe needs more entrepreneurs.

Solutions coming out of the brainstorming:

Education of the young Europeans

-integrate teaching Entrepreneurship in very early classes at school, make all students understand what is an entrepreneur and that they can be one, too
-have entrepreneurs explain what they do to schools and universities
-make the internships in companies compulsory throughout Europe whatever the specialization of the student is and increase their rate

Simplify the process of creating a company and the administration during the first years as much as possible

Small businesses need to have different regulations for the first years of their growth, make their life easier, it is already difficult enough to find the first clients, keep them and find new ones not to have to worry all the time about administration.

Rules and regulations, tax and laws, should make it much easier for an entrepreneur to create his own business

Education and support to Entrepreneurs

-create a European support program to help entrepreneurs get the answers and the support they need.

A pan-european communications campaign for entrepreneurship

-increase awareness on why entrepreneurship is good for society (taking risks, creating jobs, success is good, anybody can do it)
-talk about success being good and that "you can do it"
-talk about failures, explain why and what failed and make people aware that failure is part of the risk
-we could create a day of the entrepreneurs in Europe, like for the day of music, to promote their role, hold conferences, have companies open their doors, make the public understand that it is not that difficult to create a company, give everybody the will to take risks

Get the successful entrepreneurs share their experiences on a European level in any form, best could be in written form (we should get as many entrepreneurs as we can start a blog and share their experiences).