This report comes just as we are concluding a year of shock to our lives, caused by the pandemic. Our health and our societies are suffering unprecedented impacts and transformations. Clearly, the world is no longer the same and we need to react. We know from previous experiences that entrepreneurs and young companies are key actors in the processes of creative destruction and can contribute decisively to the economic recovery and job creation necessary to overcome crises.

In this context, countercyclical public policies should focus on generating the necessary conditions to revitalize and enhance the “animal spirits”, which have been hit by the sharp drop in economic activity, and foster the drive to respond to opportunities offered by the emerging world. We saw at Prodem the need to contribute to these tasks by generating new knowledge and useful guidelines for the required action for both reconstruction and transformation.

In this sense, this report presents, on the one hand, the results of an exercise that constitutes a first measurement of the impact of the pandemic on conditions for dynamic entrepreneurship. These results reveal where it is necessary to carry out interventions aimed at reversing the damage. Each country can, based on this, design a reconstruction agenda based on those priorities.

At the same time, it is also necessary to begin to look ahead and envision how the transformative trends that are underway are going to shape the ecosystems of tomorrow. As an old saying goes “in order to use a trend to your advantage, you must be able to anticipate it.” In today’s uncertain world, this is both necessary and challenging. To contribute in this regard, we decided to undertake an exercise of collective imagination together with leading experts from different countries in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, and with the valuable support of the Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN). This exercise allowed us to identify a set of trends and scenarios that enable ecosystems leaders to think about the entrepreneurial economies of the future.

Thus, this report can be used to assess how the identified impacts and general trends come to life in each ecosystem, taking into account its own starting point. Combining these two perspectives is key to building the right conditions for entrepreneurship and innovation to drive the reconstruction and transformation of the different countries and regions. We hope that this report will serve as a guiding compass in the midst of so much gloom, and to continue collaborating in deepening this work to assess the particular conditions of each country as needed.