During the last week, I have been delighted, along with an extraordinary group of individuals from Wales, to attend the Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Programme (Reap) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the world’s leading universities.

Reap has been established to enable regional leaders to accelerate economic growth and job creation through innovation-driven entrepreneurship.

This is quite different to starting a business in that it refers to the pursuing global opportunities based on bringing forward new innovations to customers that have clear competitive advantage and high growth potential. In short, it is about building and supporting those innovative growth firms that can have a real impact on their markets.

So how does Reap work?

First of all, each partner region sends a team of highly driven and influential members representing the region’s five major stakeholder groups, namely government, risk capital, academia, entrepreneurs and industry.

Learning journey

And part of the learning journey is to work with the other teams in this particular cohort so we learn from each other.

Certainly, as we learnt through conversations with the other teams during the last three days, there are some real powerful opportunities to develop close links with the other seven regions, namely Al Madinah (Saudi Arabia), Ashdod (Israel), Bangkok (Thailand), Beijing (China), Santiago (Chile), South West Norway and Tokyo (Japan).

Over the next two years, the Wales team will be involved, along with the other seven teams, in a series of intensive interactive workshops directed by MIT faculty research and practice, which will enable the building of internal capability to develop and implement strategies customised to the Welsh economy’s strengths and opportunities.

Drawing on lessons learnt

But one of the most important lessons from the three days is that it is the region, and not the MIT faculty, that analyses and determines what needs to done and how best to achieve their goals, although this will draw on the best practice and lessons learnt from some of the best entrepreneurial ecosystems in the world.

This includes determining how the innovation capacity (universities, government R&D, network of researchers, medical centres and innovation capacity) links up with entrepreneurial capacity (entrepreneurs, mentors, founding teams and investors) to combine innovative ideas and pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities to enabled innovation-based enter-prises to flourish.

Therefore, it is up to the individual region to make the most of the opportunities to change their entrepreneurial ecosystem to drive forward economic development.

In fact, MIT Reap has already engaged over 15 regions around the world, including London, Finland, New Zealand, Valencia and Istanbul and is already seeing a preliminary and positive impact through realistic plans for entrepreneurial acceleration.

One of the most successful interventions using the Reap model has been in Scotland where the focus has been not on reinventing the wheel but on repositioning their entrepreneurship ecosystem so that they all work more effectively together in the long term.

This has resulted in a series of targeted interventions that work alongside each other such as: the Scottish Edge competition to address the shortage of seed capital; Scotland Can Do, which is bringing disciplined entrepreneurship teaching to 2,000 people in a few years; Entrepreneurial Scotland, an organisation focused on high growth entrepreneurship and which has over 700 members to date; and the Global Ambitions Network, a close network of highly skilled and trained entrepreneurs who support each other and share experiences about what has or hasn’t worked in their organisations.

A real opportunity

Certainly, the Welsh team is committed to making the most of this opportunity and if entrepreneurs and innovators such as Simon Gibson, Drew Nelson, James Taylor and Ashley Cooper have given a week of their busy lives to attend MIT to help kickstart this process, then it shows how serious we all are to make sure we transform the economic fortunes of our nation.

More importantly, the team has agreed that is not just about what we can contribute on our own.

Indeed, we are determined to involve as many people as possible over the next two years in establishing what Wales wants to achieve, what the priorities are, and how the ecosystem is upgraded to impact on international competitiveness.

Therefore, Reap gives Wales a real opportunity to improve its economic position over the next few years by working with other regions and drawing on some of the best global brains in the world.

Certainly, there is no excuse not to do this given the link up with MIT and other regions globally and it is now up to all of us here in Wales with an interest in the future of this nation to make sure we maximise this opportunity to make the most of the entrepreneurial and innovative capacity within our economy.