How government can enable peace through entrepreneurship

[caption id=”attachment_23523” align=”alignnone” width=”2048”] Photo: USAID Afghanistan[/caption]

In “Peace Through Entrepreneurship: Investing in a Startup Culture for Security and Development,” former State Department staffer Steven Koltai makes the case that world peace can best be achieved through nonmilitary means, especially entrepreneurship that leads to global job creation.

Koltai, now managing director of Koltai & Co., previously served as senior advisor for entrepreneurship under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, where he ran the nascent Global Entrepreneurship program. GEP’s mission, and the core of Koltai’s message in “Peace Through Entrepreneurship,” is aimed at creating entrepreneurship ecosystems based on a six pillar framework.

Koltai’s Six+Six Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Model includes identifying entrepreneurs, help get them the training they need to succeed, connect them to all appropriate resources and networks, fund them, enable public policy that supports new ventures, and celebrate their efforts and progress. This model depends of the collective support of governments, investors, academia, foundations, non-governmental organizations and corporations.

Writes Koltai:

"It is only government that has the wherewithal, mandate, and obligation to do entrepreneurship at the large, highly coordinated scale required. It is government that stimulates investment in failing and fragile states, and it is government that can turn sectors safe as a first-in investor. And, most important, it is government that is responsible for the security of its citizens. A government that allows the source of its threats to fester and spread unchecked is negligent, and especially so when a solution to those threats presents itself in the expertise of that government's citizens. The U.S. government must elevate entrepreneurship as a foreign policy tool."

Learn more: “Peace Through Entrepreneurship: Investing in a Startup Culture for Security and Development”