The Entrepreneurship World Cup could change your business forever
• A Life-changing Experience
• Any entrepreneur
• All stages
• Everywhere
• This is the Entrepreneurship World Cup by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s sponsored Misk Foundation Initiative
The Entrepreneurship World Cup started out as an idea, much like your business, that three teams deeply believed in and scaled it out to what you see now, 198 countries and more than 150,000 entrepreneurs!
The Misk Global Forum is a flagship ongoing platform of the Misk Foundation, a non-profit philanthropic foundation founded by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, established to discover, develop, and empower the youth to become active participants in the knowledge economy. The Misk Global Forum brings young leaders, creators and thinkers together with established global innovators to explore, experience and experiment with ways to meet the challenge of change.
Life-changing Prizes
The value proposition of EWC is all about the entire experience – training, resources, connections, mentorship and more. But on top of that, we’ve got a great number of impactful prizes – $1 million in cash prizes total for the global winners plus a combined $70 million worth of in-kind support for the top 100 global finalists, not to mention investment opportunities and awesome resources and perks from our leading partners. In addition to these global prizes, many EWC national competitions offer their own prizes.
The EWC team has been working on some exciting changes for this year’s competition and we wanted to let you know about them. This year’s competition encourages entrepreneurs from all stages — idea-stage, early-stage, growth-stage or beyond – by providing them with tools and resources to grow their ventures.
The Entrepreneurship World Cup is more than just a global pitch competition with a shot at life-changing prizes. With 150,000 entrants from around the world, EWC elevates entrepreneurs – providing you with tools and resources to grow your venture. Building on last year’s success, the second edition of the EWC offers you the opportunity to:
For All Participants Support services business (upon registration) These include online resources provided by partners such as Google Cloud, Hubspot, Stripe and more, up to an estimated non-cash value of $25,000 USD
For The top 100 global finalists package of in-kind services value of $700,000 USD
For the Grand Champions Cash prizes at the Global competition – $100,000,000 USD
With physical events impossible due to the coronavirus pandemic, we are taking the EWC online with virtual national finals throughout July and August. The 100 Top finalists will then progress to the global finals in October. If you’re developing a new business idea, or your existing start-up has made great progress during the last 12 months, we would love to hear from you. Feel free to visit www.entrepreneurshipworldcup.com with your wider network. We look forward to welcoming you to this year’s competition.
Last year’s 100 finalists pitched their ideas before thousands of people at the EWC Global Finals in Riyadh. The overall winner was NERv Technology from Canada, with an innovative monitoring system for post-operative medical patients. Reflecting on his company’s experience last year, NERv Technology’s COO Amr Abdelgawad said: “Since the EWC, NERv has successfully completed feasibility clinical studies and testing the device on 10 patients. The EWC has generated a tremendous amount of PR coverage for NERv, allowing it to attract clinical partners and investors to continue developing its medical device.”
This year’s program of support is bigger and better. EWC Accelerates is a virtual training and mentorship program that helps entrepreneurs hone their skills and increase their chances of winning their national competitions – as well as those who advance to the Global Finals. Through the EWC platform, participants will have access to an exclusive content library with relevant information to their current stage of the journey, including:
• Pitching and deck creation;
• Customer feedback and product development;
• Team building and company culture.
In 2020, the EWC platform also offers all contestants who complete their applications an access to a wider range of ‘perks’ than last year, with online resources available to an unlimited number of people, provided by partners such as Google Cloud, Hubspot, Stripe and more, up to an estimated non-cash value of $25,000 USD.
Other innovations for 2020 include a new social entrepreneurship track, new standalone prizes for categories such as ‘best idea’ or ‘best growth’.
The Entrepreneurship World Cup is hosted by the Misk Global Forum, Global Entrepreneurship Network and The Global Education & Leadership Foundation. It is supported by a range of global partners, including GSVlabs, Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO),TechCrunch, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, WebCongress and organizations running EWC National Finals on every continent.
“For the EWC’s second edition in 2020, we want to take last year’s successes and magnify them. ‘Bigger and better’ has been our simple mantra, but in the current circumstances we have now added ‘different’” said Abdulrahman Al-Suhaymi, Misk’s EWC lead. He added: “The virtual platform that we’re developing means that the EWC 2020 will be more accessible, more diverse, and more inclusive than ever before as we target 200,000 startups taking part. Whatever the coronavirus throws at us, our ambition remains undimmed. Because at Misk, we believe that young people are not a problem to be solved, but the world’s greatest problem solvers and now, more than ever, we need to empower their entrepreneurial spirit. The EWC encourages as many young entrepreneurs as possible to get involved.”
“Entrepreneurs are risk takers and industry disruptors, accustomed to facing challenges head on,” said Jonathan Ortmans, president of Global Entrepreneurship Network. “Now more than ever, the world needs more entrepreneurs to unleash their ideas and develop innovative solutions and make the world a better place.”