Calling All Entrepreneurs

From Nov. 12-18, 123 countries will celebrate Global Entrepreneurship Week. The idea behind the international event is to start a dialogue about entrepreneurship and inspire young people to turn their ideas into reality, something we at 51 percent strongly encourage.

In this corner of the world, IESE’s Centre d’Iniciativa Emprenedora i Innovació (EIC) will coordinate “Global Entrepreneruship Week in Spain,” which will include more than 450 activities, conferences, seminars and investment forums in 50 cities. You can find more information here.

If you’re a young entrepreneur, we’d love to hear from you. We want to know more about your experiences in starting a business in Spain, what challenges you faced, and what lessons you learned along the way. Post a comment on our Facebook wall or drop us an email at 51percentBCN@gmail.com. Maybe we’ll feature you on our blog.

World Bank: No, You’re Not Lazy. Starting a Business in Spain is Ridiculously Difficult

The further we get in reporting on this crisis, the more we hear about obstacles to creative exits from it. Abroad, lots of criticism exists of the culture here — that people are lazy, or dependent on government jobs, or unable to imagine an entrepreneurial response to the collapse of Spain’s traditional ways of making a living. And there is a kernel of truth in the idea that people here are, while  not lazy (if you have a job here, you probably work insane hours) certainly used to the labor market that has existed since the arrival of democracy, and now are faced with a tough transition to another. It’s a big change.

But: there also seem to be some barriers that go beyond attitudes, and seem more likely to be tamping down efforts to bootstrap one’s way out of the crisis. The key one is the legal obstacles to starting a business.

A few days ago, the World Bank released a report that got very little coverage in the Anglophone press but a lot of attention here, noting that Spain is one of the most difficult places in the world to start a business. Called Doing Business 2013, the report ranked Spain among the worst in Europe, and 136 out of 185 nations in one general classification, for its ease of launching an enterprise. It’s easier to launch a business in Afghanistan, apparently. The report notes that to go from an idea to a grand opening requires ten different, apparently unrelated administrative functions, most of which have problems running smoothly.

So. If true, then more than old attitudes toward work, some of the problem here appears to be old laws that probably made sense when they passed, but now create a morass of administrative obstacles, that are both expensive and maddening to navigate. The finding puts some statistical grounding into what had been a vague debate: are Spanish hands idle, or are they tied? Apparently, it’s more the latter.