The MIT Global Startup Workshop (GSW) is the world's premier conference on fostering entrepreneurship through supportive and catalytic infrastructure such as that epitomized by MIT's entrepreneurial ecosystem. Each year, roughly 30 MIT students organize the 3 day conference in close collaboration with partners from a different host country in order to discuss practical steps that can be taken by students, academic faculty, venture capitalists, government leaders, entrepreneurs, and top business leaders.

This event provides an unrivaled opportunity to share best practices for fostering and supporting entrepreneurs within and between different regions and for contributing to the global network of entrepreneurial support organizations.

The MIT $100K Business Plan Competition competition is widely regarded as the most successful and prestigious business plan competition in the world. Over the past 18 years, the organization has set the standard for executing a student-run entrepreneurship competition. The MIT $100K has facilitated the birth of over 85 companies with an aggregate value of over $10.5 billion dollars. Recognizing a need to support other entrepreneurship competitions, the MIT $100K created the MIT Global Startup Workshop (GSW) in 1998 to spread knowledge about the value of business plan competitions and how to run them. Since then, the mission of the GSW has expanded to cover more of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, and currently the MIT GSW operates independently from the MIT $100K.

The 2007 MIT GSW attracted over 250 participants from over 30 countries. Since its inaugural conference at MIT in 1998, the MIT GSW has been hosted in Singapore, Spain, Australia, Italy, China, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Argentina, and Norway.

We are excited to announce that the 2009 MIT GSW will be held in Cape Town, South Africa.