The White House is hosting a summit on Global entrepreneurship in Washington D.C. next week. In a conference call earlier today, white house spokes people stated that the initiative is a result of certain promises made during the President’s Cairo speech. The conference will focus on areas of education, science and technology, economic opportunities, health and social media entrepreneurship. The White House sees this initiative as a first step in the larger process of having America more involved as a positive catalyst for change throughout the world. The administration also hopes that this initiative will spark a bevy of activity with NGO’s and multinational organizations to encourage cooperation.
Even though the spokesman for the White House insisted that the summit is more of a global initiative, he did emphasize in a different part of his overview, that Muslim Majority countries are especially encouraged to share their views and attend.
The summit is an admirable idea, and hopefully will spark more cooperation between the U.S. and the rest of the world in terms of sharing ideas, technology and trade, which will help America stay competitive in the global market place. One interesting development would be,( if Israeli businessmen or scientists were in fact invited, which wasn’t altogether clear from the description) more regional cooperation in the Middle East. There are many mutual interests, between the people of the middle east that can be addressed during such a forum without interruption from government officials. I suspect some of the key points of mutual agreement and concern would be innovative business models, which would be beneficial to the region (including Israel), as well as mutual problems such as lack of clean water and rich soil and scientific solutions that would encourage water and land conservation.