Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-03-13-Speech-2-292"
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"en.20070313.22.2-292"2
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".
That is a subject that is of particular concern to me. The European economy is not as dynamic as it could be, it is not creating as many jobs as it could, and the main reason is that we do not have enough enterprises. We do not have enough enterprises because we in Europe do not have enough people who are prepared to take entrepreneurial initiatives and to carry entrepreneurial risk.
The last point I would like to mention is the problem of finance, which is a key problem for the creation of new businesses. The Commission has increased the funding available for the period 2007 to 2013 considerably. Most of the Competitiveness and Innovation Programme goes into financial instruments: we are making more than EUR 1 billion available here for credits and counter-guarantees, for national guarantee facilities and other modern financial instruments, including the provision of share capital. The programme is being very well received by small and medium-sized enterprises.
Over all we have therefore taken a wide range of measures, which I hope will encourage more new young businesses in Europe.
The most important answer to your question is therefore that we need a growing understanding in our societies themselves that it is enterprises that create jobs, that there have to be entrepreneurs with the courage to do that, and that entrepreneurial activity has to be accepted as socially responsible, socially useful activity. We therefore need to work for greater social acceptance of entrepreneurial initiatives. The Commission has developed a large number of initiatives there in the last two years.
Last year, the European Agenda for Entrepreneurship published a progress report, from which you can see that we have greatly increased the resources for the Community financial instruments for enterprises, that we have provided the stimulus for the formation of mini-companies by schoolchildren and students, so that they can learn entrepreneurial activity, and we have the database run by the Euro Information Centres to help find business partners.
If Europe is to create growth and employment, it must provide a general social framework that encourages entrepreneurial initiative. As mindsets are formed early in life, education can make an important contribution to successfully promoting entrepreneurship. On the basis of the work done in the Member States, the Commission was able to adopt a communication on promoting entrepreneurship in schools and universities in February 2006.
I would like to see all European schoolchildren and students having the opportunity of coming into contact with business reality during their time at school and during their studies. In many European countries that is already done in an exemplary manner. But in a number of countries there are still substantial deficits.
At present, the Commission is very much involved in putting across entrepreneurial ways of thinking at university level. We know that the experience in America has been extraordinarily positive. Universities that offer to teach entrepreneurial skills and thinking report great successes in that a much higher percentage of graduates from those universities are willing to start a business after completing their studies than is the case here.
There are three other important ways in which we can help to make it easier for people to start businesses. Firstly, there is the whole ‘better regulation’ project with simplification of the law and cutting red tape. Many people are prevented psychologically from starting a business because they believe there are too many regulations and that they are too complicated.
Secondly, because many people do not even start to set up a business because they think it is much too complicated, last year we proposed to the European Council that the Member States should commit themselves to limiting the time needed to start a company to one week. That should be the case in all the Member States by the end of this year.
Finally, I would like to point out that we are looking very hard at the question of the negative consequences of bankruptcy. How do we deal with the failure of the first attempt? As you know, in America it is no problem at all socially if the first attempt at business is a failure. In many European countries, the first failure is also the last."@en1
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