Exploring Innovative Ways to Advance Policy Reform
The 2016 Startup Europe Comes to Silicon Valley (SEC2SV) mission, created and organized by Mind the Bridge as part of the Startup Europe Partnership initiative and co-organized with EIT Digital, brought together a group of entrepreneurs, investors, and policy experts from both sides of the Atlantic in the Bay Area.
The week-long program of activities featured a Policy Hack in partnership with Dell, to explore innovative ways to address some of today’s most pressing policy issues faced by global innovators and entrepreneurs.
The objective of the Policy Hack was to give top-line thinking from a transatlantic perspective on how policy conditions for entrepreneurs could be improved.
Teams of four to five ‘hackers’ were given one hour to brainstorm and draft solutions for five different issue areas: trade, privacy and data transfers, IPR and copyright, access to capital, and worker mobility. Each solution was then pitched to a team of judges.
Teams were asked to draft a solution that had a reasonable level of utility and featured the ability to be replicated as well as prospects of being adopted.
This report describes the Policy Hack methodology and summarizes the main outcomes of the discussion.
While we are fully aware that the topics addressed during the hackathon are of significant complexity to be unbundled in just a few hours of work, we strongly value the process undertaken: exposing policy matters to a balanced representation of policy makers, entrepreneurs, and investors/managers. And using problem-solving processes that are closer to the world of entrepreneurs.
As such, we consider the recommendations proposed below as possible high-level suggestions, rather than properly actionable proposals.