FUTURALLIA 2011 will take place in Kansas City from May 18-20. From the event’s website: “Over two days, this international business development event will allow business leaders to have up to 16 personalized and pre-scheduled, 30-minute, face-to-face meetings with partners of their choice. FUTURALLIA is a springboard toward making new international partnerships, in addition to informal meetings in a professional and friendly environment.”

Find out more about FUTURALLIA 2011 here.

Jonathan Ortmans covered Bolivia in his recent Policy Forum Blog post. “…[I]t is young firms that grow that provide the most benefits to society in terms of job and wealth creation and innovation,” he writes. “Thus, the challenge ahead for Bolivia is to enable more growth entrepreneurs.” the problem, according to Ortmans, is that the Bolivian government’s policies “discourage the participation of entrepreneurs in the economy.”

However, “young Bolivians understand that they can create a “new” breed of enterprise, different from the micro-businesses that have flourished in Bolivia due to necessity. They envision enterprises that capture opportunities for innovation and that generate more employment, more wealth and improved social conditions for everyone in the process.”

Read the full article here.

Via the Policy Forum on Entrepreneurship, here is a good New York Times article on entrepreneurship in Argentina. With the government in debt, and with little access to credit, “slowly, Argentines are beginning to trust and invest in each other.” The article profiles the founders of a software startup as examples of how the response of individuals to the stormy economic climate of Argentina is changing.

Read the article here.

Professor Nimish Adhia is the Miller Upton Teaching Fellow in Economics at Beloit College. He received his B.A from Illinois Wesleyan University and his M.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he has recently defended his Ph.D. in economics. His talk will be based on his “Bourgeois Virtues in Indian Movies: How Bollywood heralded India’s Economic Liberalization,” which he presented at the Midwest Political Science Association conference in Chicago in 2009.

Professor Adhia will give a talk in conjunction with Dr. Hicks’s Business and Economic Ethics class on Friday, September 24 at 11 am in SCAR 220.

All who are interested may attend. We hope to see you there!

View the PDF of our flyer announcing Professor Adhia’s talk.

Iceland took first place in INSEAD’s Global Innovation Index (PDF) this year. Last year it won an award for best entrepreneurship movement. Iceland’s strengths, therefore, in entrepreneurship and innovation could help the country recover from its recent banking collapse. Read more at the Policy Dialogue on Entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship is becoming more popular in Brazil, despite the relative difficulty of starting a business there and the complexity of the country’s tax system.

Read more about the conditions driving Brazil’s entrepreneurship boom at the Policy Dialogue on Entrepreneurship Blog.

And not only that, Brazil has the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016.

Two weeks ago, the Policy Dialogue on Entrepreneurship explored entrepreneurship in Turkey. Now Jonathan Ortmans looks at Saudi Arabia and finds a very entrepreneurial country. For example, it is ranked number 13 out of 183 economies for “ease of starting a business” (the U.S. is number 8).

Read more here.

The Kauffman Foundation’s Policy Dialogue on Entrepreneurship has a fascinating article on entrepreneurship in Turkey. Why, asks author Jonathan Ortmans, does Turkey have such a low rate of entrepreneurship when it is so strong economically?

Read the article here.

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.