 Hello, this is Gerard Leonhardt. Welcome to another edition of Meeting of the Minds. Today I have with me from Sydney, Australia, Ross Dawson, futurist, author, strategist and a good friend. I spent a lot of my time traveling the world looking and seeing what's going on. I think perhaps the biggest single trend is this rise of entrepreneurship, rise of startups. The big companies aren't going away, but the innovative, the talented, the creative people are all saying I want to do my own thing. I've got a great idea and the cost of being able to go from idea to conception to reality to implementation has just been shrunk enormously. So you can see an extraordinary rich ecosystem. The last three or four years, if you look at Zurich or Istanbul or Cairo or Bangkok or Melbourne or any of these cities, there's just these flourishing style of ecosystem. So this changes the very nature of business. It's where the activity is happening. Big companies are finding all the best people are going there. If they want innovation, they're having to go outside. So this is seeing this big transformation. We're seeing crowdfunding and other mechanisms and support to be able to create that. So I think we're going to see this more of this economy of startups around the world flourishing as we move forward. I mean, have you been seeing this in your travels? To not really, I've seen the same thing. I think what is happening is we've seen the shift from you had to have the right sort of breeding ground for entrepreneurship and the right tools and technology. And so now what we're seeing now is clearly it has moved away from saying I need computers to program or a space to plug them in or so. Now it's all about just a permission basically to say that you have permission to do something because now you can host something on Amazon for five cents until nobody uses it. And you can use all these tools and all the information and the code is all there and the APIs are all there and all these things. So being an entrepreneur is wide open now. So it has shifted from this idea of the technical or the financial enablement to the mental enablement of being an entrepreneur. This is the only hurdle that we have in Europe. It's all here except that we're not allowing ourselves to do it. So it has shifted from the tools to permission. And this is a societal problem that permission to play or to experiment. But that's our biggest problem in Europe. I was recently speaking to an entrepreneur in Zurich who said that the Swiss startup scene is like a five star hotel with nobody in it. All of the ecosystem and the support system is there but people aren't actually engaging in it. In other countries which are perhaps people are less comfortable. So for example in Southeast Asia or in Chile or in South Africa or so and or Uganda we're seeing all sorts of these startups emerge because these are the all terms they have. So perhaps it's being less comfortable which is going to support more of these ecosystems or I think we need to be able to certainly have changing social attitudes. The global entrepreneurship monitor study great data and one of the variables it shows in each country it shows the fear of failure and how large or how small that is. And I think that the fear of failure tends to be higher particularly when people tend to have expectations of status and jobs and titles and so on. So if we move beyond that fear of failure that's when the opportunities emerge. Yeah this is of course a cultural question. You know I think all we would need to do in Europe is to basically put out a one page header in the in the herald tribune or something saying you know it's okay to fail and then all of a sudden we'd have this huge boost of activity and you know in America you're not a good entrepreneur until you've gone bankrupt at least once and that that's a fact. Here if you go bankrupt once you nobody can talk to you anymore because you're you know you're dangerous you're like a virus you know you've you've lost your spot in the food chain. So this is a thing that we really have to tackle here and this has nothing to do with money or it has to do with this thing and I think it's also that the you know change is driven largely by two factors which is either pain or love. So you you have a huge pain and you got to go a bit of it you do something or you fall in love with an idea and you just can't let go of it. And both of those factors are needed and so we have to create the reason that I'm going to invent something you know there and this is the reason why all that stuff is happening in California because everybody wants to be eBay. But in Brazil in Indonesia and India and South Africa people are doing this because they're hungry. If you're not hungry why do you look for something to eat? So this is I think it's a key point for entrepreneurship. As Steve Jobs said you know stay hungry stay foolish. That's that's very true and then we have to learn from that I think. So is there anything that governments or companies or individuals should do to foster a world of more entrepreneurship? Well I think in Europe and I think also for many countries around the world if you just take the lid off you know you take the lid off this pressure thing that says whatever you do has to be successful otherwise you're toast. You know when you remove that lid they allow people to try something and to blow something or to goof off or to be wasteful you know then then you have enough room and God knows there's many people I mean most people fail. What I see is communities and it's startups are not based in countries they're based in cities and they're based in communities and the more the examples to point to and to look for which provides support the more they'll do that and I think what we're seeing and I've seen in many cities these emerging networks and communities around startups anything we can do to be able support those communities? Well we talked about Switzerland you know some other takes this is what would be revolutionary for Switzerland to do is to say look you know what we're going to become the place like Singapore but not a state controlled to where we create this this huge momentum of where you can come and realize and do playful things create a play park essentially which is what they've done kind of in Singapore but with a more sort of strict application to it but it has been very successful as becoming the place you know supporting this kind of development of new ideas to create a huge pool for this culturally and money-wise and otherwise and this would not be hard to do because people like being here. Yeah I think there's many things to be done but to recognize that it is a journey that's not things don't happen overnight there is drawing that and when there's drawing the right people together supporting them working together supporting their visibility globally that community support is will help build you know the multiple entrepreneurial centers we have in Europe. You know if you're looking at this entrepreneurship concept it's very much like saying if you go to Rod Stewart or Mick Jagger and say give me a recipe to be a rock star. There's no recipe to be a rock star you know you can learn from how they did it right but there's no recipe to being an entrepreneur or furthering entrepreneurship you can't copy what the Americans do because it's a very complex ecosystem what we need to do here is to create the ecosystem in our own way that has enough momentum and not just one piece so we don't just give the entrepreneurs a bunch of offices and computers we have to create the culture around it you know the inspiration the the attitude the funding of course but also just the freedom to be weird right which which Americans have you know by nature right so that we need that here so this concludes today's episode of Meeting of the Minds thanks very much to Ross Dawson for being part of this today if you want to know more about the show you can go to meetingoftheminds.tv we're also taking questions and inputs for the next show just use the twitter hashtag meetingoftheminds and we'll be responding and trying to work your comments into our next show thanks very much for joining us