Dr Sreevas Sahasranamam, Associate Professor at the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship, co-chaired the task force on sustainability at the G20 Startup Summit at Gurugram, India in July. The startup policy communique was showcased by the taskforce chair along with Hon. Minister of Commerce and Industry Piyush Goyal and chair of Startup20 Chintan Vaishnav during the Startup20 summit.
Under G20, a first-of-its-kind official engagement group was initiated under the Indian presidency of the G20 2023 to focus on startups called Startup20. It acts as a dialogue forum with the global startup ecosystem stakeholders and intends to represent the global startup ecosystem to raise the macroeconomic concerns and challenges faced by entrepreneurs with G20 leaders.
Startup20 has five main task forces – Foundation, Alliances, Finance, Inclusion, and Sustainability. The task forces are structured to develop key priorities and bring forward the topics in which recommendations would be formulated to support the startup ecosystems globally. Through multiple deliberations, the task forces developed a policy communique for global startup ecosystem development and received feedback from startup ecosystem stakeholders from G20 nations. These recommendations were to be finalised at the Startup20 Summit in Gurugram in July 2023 to be handed over to the G20 leaders at the 18th G20 Heads of State and Government Summit in New Delhi in September 2023.
On working on the task force and attending the Startup20 summit, Dr Sahasranamam said, “It was a wonderful opportunity to engage in policy development at the intersection of entrepreneurship and SDGs and share the platform with some of the stalwarts at the intersection of industry and policy. My research and teaching have been entirely in this space and I am glad to be given this opportunity by the Startup20 team to engage in the translation of research to policy and impact through this task force.”
As a part of the Sustainability taskforce at G20 Startup20 Sreevas has developed a policy paper that fed into the overall communique, details available here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7084818264693846018/ and he features in a video discussing his experience: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7086621022682046465?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop