The Estonian state-owned Estonian Development Fund wants to provide a programme for increasing entrepreneurship for 100,000 people in the next seven years, LETA/Postimees Online reports.
The aim is for at least 5,000 of the people who participate in the programme to create new companies and addition of at least a thousand new companies that would emerge as the result of the programme, which should generate 100 million euros of extra added value a year.
"Although we like to believe that Estonians are already very enterprising, studies show that the majority of university graduates see their future as salaried employees," said Development Fund board chairman Tõnis Arro when speaking in the parliament on Tuesday. Estonia is considerably behind the EU average in enterprisingness, not to mention the USA.
The fund thus intend to launch next year the pilot project Enterprising Estonia and include at least 100,000 people in the so-called tiger leap programme of entrepreneurship in 2014-2020. "Young people are more enterprising by nature and thus our attention will be focused on high school seniors, students and students of vocational schools, at the same time we hope to infect more experienced active Estonians with the entrepreneurship germ too," said Arro.
Juhan Tere
I'd love to understand the logic behind this. 5000 extra one people companies generating 100m in value added sounds great due to 'big numbers' but in fact it suggests 5000 1 person companies with 20,000 each of value added.
This will surely not a) raise productivity levels b) raise innovation intensity c) improve competitiveness of Estonian economy.
Posted by: Alasdair Reid | September 20, 2012 at 07:50