If you want to understand what’s happening with entrepreneurs around the world, the annual Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report is a good place to start.  This annual assessment (now in its 27th year) typically surveys entrepreneurs from as many as 53 different countries, assessing how local people start and grow businesses, and how these new ventures drive (or fail to drive) local and national prosperity.

The latest 2025-2026 GEM report is out and, as usual, it’s full of interesting ideas and insights.  The global report, and the various country-level reports, typically track startup patterns and also ask entrepreneurs to offer insights on their business journeys.  This year’s report contains some interesting insights:

Across the globe, startup levels are topping previous records.  But, fewer of these firms are going on to further growth and success.  As the authors note, “The evidence in this report confirms that, for many economies, survival and growth — not startup formation alone — are now the defining challenges of entrepreneurship.”

Few nations and regions support robust and effective ecosystems.  Only a few economies are deemed to provide strong support in all key program areas.  Provision of business finance and entrepreneurship education in the schools are areas where the biggest ecosystem gaps exist.

A potential AI gap may be emerging.  In 19 of 48 surveyed countries, a plurality of entrepreneurs does not see AI as an important business tool.  Closing this gap should be a future priority.

As a long-time evaluator of local entrepreneurship programs, I know that entrepreneur ecosystem initiatives can have many positive impacts.  They hopefully generate more startups, more successful startups, and nurture an ecosystem that can help many more entrepreneurs in the future.

One other potential impact is that entrepreneur training and support help entrepreneurs make better decisions. These good decisions might relate to business expansion, but they may also relate to the closure of less promising ventures.  But, proving that we helped an entrepreneur to “avoid bad decisions” or “fail smart” can be tough to document.  It’s kind of like the old, “if a tree falls in the woods. . .” analogy.  How do you prove it?An interesting new SSRN research paper, “Learning to Quit? A Multi-Year, Multi-Site Field Experiment with Innovation-Driven Entrepreneurs,” suggests that well-run training programs do help entrepreneurs to “fail smart.”  The major study examined 553 innovation-focused startups operating in 12 different coworking spaces around the US, with some of the firms receiving support (i.e., coaching and training) and others remaining in control groups without such support. 

The study yielded two important findings.  First, supported firms who remained in business outperformed peers in terms of raising funds and generating more jobs and revenue.  Second, the researchers found that struggling firms who received support were more likely to close earlier with fewer financial and career consequences.  These results are an important finding, showing that entrepreneur support programs not only help firms start and grow, but that they can also help them to fail fast, smart, and cheap!