Delegates

The Summit was built around its delegates. Around seven hundred young entrepreneurs, business leaders, global thinkers and ecosystem builders were expected to take part across the week, making the event an unusually concentrated network of founders and the people who support them. The value of the Summit lay as much in the people in the room as in the programme on stage.

Who attended the Summit

Delegates came from the twenty G20 member economies and the European Union, usually organised into national delegations led by a country leader. Each delegation mixed business founders with representatives of the organisations that support entrepreneurs in that country, so that conversations could move quickly from personal experience to practical policy.

The organisers also welcomed special requests from media representatives, sponsors and speakers whose roles sat outside the standard delegate profile but whose contribution added clear value to the week.

Essential delegate criteria

Applicants for a delegate place had to be young entrepreneurs with a genuine passion for the difference entrepreneurship can make. The Summit was designed to produce a global action plan on youth employment, so delegates needed both the standing and the practical experience to contribute to it. The essential criteria were:

• 40 years of age or under, with exceptions considered on prior application and acceptance by the summit managers
• Business founder, co-founder or majority shareholder, or a leader in building the entrepreneur ecosystem
• Clear on the outcome to build an action plan on youth unemployment
• Specific experience and ability to add value to at least one of the six pillars

Applicants also had to show the capacity to take part fully in a demanding, collaborative week of work.

The six pillars

Each delegate’s experience was expected to map to at least one of the six pillars of a cohesive entrepreneurial ecosystem that framed the Summit: access to capital, education and coordinated support, government regulation, globalisation and trade, entrepreneurship culture, and innovation and technology. These pillars shaped the working groups and gave the recommendations a consistent structure.

What makes an ideal delegate

Beyond the essential criteria, the organisers described an ideal delegate profile that helped them build a balanced and productive room. The table below summarises the criteria and the ideal profile side by side.

Building balanced delegations

The Alliance encouraged country leaders to aim for an even balance of men and women in every delegation, and to look for founders who combined commercial ambition with a genuine commitment to social impact. The Millennium Development Goals were explicitly named as a marker of that commitment.

Because delegations were assembled nationally but worked together internationally, the Summit produced mixes of experience that no single country could have created alone, from early-stage founders to leaders of established organisations.

The delegate experience

For most delegates the week began before the formal programme, with flights into Kingsford Smith Airport and check-in at the Sheraton on the Park. The first evening was deliberately unstructured, giving national delegations the chance to meet each other over drinks before the working sessions started and to begin the conversations that would continue all week.

Once sessions were under way, delegates moved between plenary sessions and pillar working groups, adding their own experience to the recommendations being drafted. The combination of large-format debate and small-group work meant that every delegate, whether the founder of a young company or the leader of a national support organisation, had a defined way to contribute.

Networking and outcomes

The scale of the Summit, with around seven hundred participants, was chosen deliberately to create extensive networking opportunities. Delegates spent as much time in conversation as in sessions, and many of the relationships formed in Sydney outlasted the week. Those connections were the mechanism through which the Summit’s recommendations were later carried back into national programmes and advocacy.

For entrepreneurs considering a future Summit, the message from 2014 was straightforward: the delegate community is the event, and the criteria exist to make sure it stays that way.