The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has recently published the 2009 edition of its international study, “Measuring Entrepreneurship.” According to the OECD website, this study is an attempt to better understand “the drivers of entrepreneurship” and “the links between entrepreneurship and its potential impacts.” The study explores such issues as the birth and death rates of enterprises, the number of innovative products created by small and large firms, and how easily entrepreneurs can access start up capital.

Read the report at OECD’s homepage.

Dr. Devi Shetty brings an innovative approach to heart surgery in India by using economies of scale to drive the price per surgery down. His flagship heart hospital, Narayana Hrudayalaya, has about 10 times the number of beds as its typical American counterpart, and the cost of surgery averages at about $2,000, versus the $20,000-$100,000 Americans pay. But does handling such a large volume of patients affect the quality of care they receive?

Read the article at the Wall Street Journal to find out.

Below a brief video interview of CEE’s executive director Dr. Stephen Hicks with our Fall 2008 guest speaker Anil Singh-Molares talking about entrepreneurship in a global marketplace and the connection between a liberal arts degree and success in the business world. Also, be sure to check out our interview with Mr. Singh-Molares for the September 2008 issue of our newsletter Kaizen here.

The World Bank’s Doing Business report for 2009 ranks countries in terms of how well their regulatory environment facilitates doing business. At the top of the list this year are: Singapore, New Zealand, United States, Hong Kong and Denmark. The report has also been tracking regulatory reforms that are supposed to make doing business easier. This year’s top reformer is Azerbaijan. Since the first Doing Business report in 2004, Eastern Europe and Asia have accounted for a third of all reforms.

Tim Kane, Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, gave this speech at the launch event of Global Entrepreneurship Week in Seoul, South Korea. Key quote:

Let’s not listen to those who say entrepreneurs are crazy. Investors often see failure as an asset in your record—not a liability. To them, failure suggests a tolerance for risk, a perseverance to succeed and, most important, a passion to push the envelope. So don’t give up. Learn from every mistake. And at each step, seek out and capitalize on the resources available to you, of the monetary and human varieties.

As for the rest of us, it’s our imperative to support the new generation of entrepreneurs and keep the pipeline of innovative ideas full and flowing. Young entrepreneurs are the world’s greatest natural resource. Innovators and those who inspire, connect and mentor them will lead the way out of economic danger and toward greater prosperity for all of society.

Anil Singh-Molares is CEO of EchoMundi, an international consulting, research and product development company based in Bellevue, Washington. Prior to founding EchoMundi, he worked for twelve years at the Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, where he was Senior Director of Vendor Relations and a recipient of the Microsoft Achievement Award. He is also currently a member of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. We met with Mr. Singh-Molares in Bellevue.

Kaizen: You are a successful businessman—yet as an undergraduate you majored in Philosophy and English Literature. That might seem a surprising background. Has your undergraduate education been relevant to your success in business?

Singh-Molares: Yes, absolutely. Philosophy in particular. English certainly gave me the ability to express myself succinctly and technically. But philosophy taught me how to think and taught me to appreciate that there are many sides to an argument, but that you have to make some judgment about what you think is the correct judgment. It has to be well-supported, it has to be well researched, well thought-out, but it should be grounded in common sense. And that’s why I, like you, am a big fan of the Greeks, Plato in particular, and Aristotle as well. So, it’s been very helpful.

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Check out Global Entrepreneurship Week, founded by the U.S.-based Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the U.K.’s Make Your Mark campaign. During that week, young people gather from around the world to generate and exchange entrepreneurial ideas. This year’s event takes place November 17 through 23. So far, 75 countries are participating by sponsoring and holding activities during that week.

Flow Vision News is the newsletter of Flow, an organization founded by educator Michael Strong and Whole Foods CEO John Mackey. The current edition interweaves the story of Senegalese entrepreneur Magatte Wade-Marchand, founder of the beverage company Adina for Life, with a discussion of the difficulties involved in fostering entrepreneurship and building up the economy in Senegal.

A report by the UK National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (FESTA), the National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship (NCGE) and The Council for Industry and Higher Education (CIHE) urges UK universities to take entrepreneurship education beyond business school startup courses and integrate it more deeply into university life so that the country can remain economically competitive. As Keith Herrmann, Deputy Chief Executive of the CIHE puts it: “Pure business skills are no longer sufficient. To add value to the workplace, graduates will need to distinguish themselves by developing entrepreneurial skills that enable them to seize and exploit opportunities, take risks, think strategically, work flexibly, manage complexity, and acquire the more generic employability skills needed for the workplace, such as team-working, communication skills, and commercial awareness.”

Technology Review published its annual “Young Innovators under 35” list. JB Straubel, who designs electric cars for Tesla Motors, ranks at the top, while Aimée Rose was named “Humanitarian of the Year” for her work on developing and commercializing explosives detection devices. Also on the list: Andrew Ng who develops household robots, Hossam Haick who created an electric nose that “sniffs out” cancer, and Michelle Chang who genetically engineers microbes to produce fuel and medical drugs.

Of related interest: Two studies on immigrant patenting. Harvard Business School’s William Kerr study “The Agglomeration of US Ethnic Inventors” (PDF) found a substantial increase in Indian and Chinese inventors. Between 1975 and 2004, the share of Chinese inventors rose from 2% to 8%, and the share of Indian inventors increased from 2% to 4%. The study also revealed that ethnic patenting is concentrated in major metropolitan areas such as San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. Between 1995 and 2004 the share of patents by ethnic inventors in these cities was 19%, 10% and 8%, respectively.

And, “How Much Does Immigration Boost Innovation?” by Jennifer Hunt and Marjolaine Gauthier-Loiselle shows “that immigrants patent at double the native rate, and that this is entirely accounted for by their disproportionately holding degrees in science and engineering. These data imply that a one percentage point rise in the share of immigrant college graduates in the population increases patents per capita by 6%.”