2015 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor

Executive Summary

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) is a global, comparative, and longitudinal study aiming to enhance the understanding of the impact of entrepreneurship on economic growth. GEM focuses on the entrepreneur as the key unit of analysis, thus enabling the monitoring of the actual entrepreneurial process from its earliest stages. The largest study of entrepreneurship in the world, GEM has been providing annual evaluations and comparisons of entrepreneurs’ characteristics, motives, growth aspirations, attitudes toward entrepreneurship, and the “entrepreneurial climate” of scores of economies in different stages of development. GEM has been running for 17 years, since 1999, and annually reviews the entrepreneurial activity in each participating economy. In 2015, approximately 198,000 adults from 62 countries participated in GEM.

Studying entrepreneurship in Ontario from the GEM perspective enables us to identify patterns of early-stage entrepreneurial activities in Ontario and compare entrepreneurship’s performance to similar developed economies. The 2015 GEM Ontario report compares Ontario’s entrepreneurial measures with those of major economies: Canada, US, Australia, and groups of developed countries (e.g., G7, EU28, G20, and Innovation-Driven Economies (IDEs). In addition, three other economies, Norway, Germany, and Israel, considered leaders in specific entrepreneurial aspects, have been added to the report as reference points. Some metrics of change over time in Ontario are also presented.