Inspiring words from GSW founder
Sally Shepard, MIT Sloan MBA Class of 1998

Throughout 1997, the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition organizers received weekly calls from people around the world interested in learning how to start a business plan competition and sharing best practices to improve existing competitions. These calls came from students, entrepreneurs, business leaders, and government officials committed to helping launch successful new ventures that would fuel local economies. Each of these individuals invested significant personal time and thought in their local entrepreneurship projects and overcame many common process challenges in addition to local issues. These conversations revealed the need for a forum to share experiences organizing business plan competitions, and, as a result, the first MIT Global Startup Workshop was launched in March 1998 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In 1997, the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition shared best practices with the team that launched the McKinsey-run national business plan competition. In 1998, McKinsey gave back to the global community by becoming the Founding Sponsor of MIT Global Startup Workshop. Gert-Hartwig Lescow, an MIT graduate student and now McKinsey alum, co-organized the first workshop with Sally Shepard.

The first MIT Global Startup Workshop focused on the same three core objectives that the workshop retains years later:

• Share best practices in the running of a business plan competitions
• Build the global network of business plan competitions
• Transfer knowledge to new competition organizing teams

The second annual MIT Global Startup workshop held in Singapore added a fourth goal:

• Bring participants up to date on the state of entrepreneurship in a specific region as well as the rest of the world.

Since its founding, the MIT GSW continues to gather global thought-leaders on new venture creation via the business plan competition process. As the competitions in the global network have matured, the workshop has expanded focus to address building sustainable environments for entrepreneurship.

The MIT Global Startup Workshop continues to offer a chance to connect with others from around the world, who share the same passion for entrepreneurship. Beyond the specific tactics suggested in panel discussions, participants report that the dialog and sense of community that stems from the MIT GSW is revitalizing and results in contacts that become a sounding board merely a phone call or an email away.