Picks in the News

The Future of Work Center of Excellence (CoE) launched by Deloitte

Deloitte has recently announced the launch of the Future of Work Center of Excellence (CoE), a first-of-its-kind platform to create solutions that anticipate market disruptions, address the skills mismatch challenge, and identify future job requirements.

Based in Singapore and with an expected investment of US$20 million over the next three years the new CoE will help to develop a suite of data analytics, automation tools, and workforce-planning cloud models for businesses and governments to address clients’ current and expected workforce needs.

The Center will catalyze job creation in Singapore and around the globe, and it will enable knowledge and skills transfer to Singapore’s core workforce while building local capabilities and labor solutions. Furthermore it will train and employ local Singapore and global talent in highly sought-after areas such as data science, UX, HR analytic, actuarial science, and natural language processing, among others.

The Future of Work Center of Excellence is the first in a series of Singapore-based, digital solutions-focused centers of excellence Deloitte is planning to establish with public and private sector players. These innovative public-private collaborations also aim to position Singapore as a global IP export and capability development hub.

More information is available here.

Call for Co-Hosting and Co-Organisation of the 14th INSME Annual Meeting in 2018

The International Network for Small and Medium Enterprises – INSME is now accepting applications to host the 14^th INSME Annual Meeting in 2018. Once a year, in collaboration with a co-host organisation, INSME members meet to discuss and decide about issues related to the life of the network and about potential future activities to be possibly developed among the members of the Association. The meeting, which is held indicatively between April and July of each year, represents one of the main highlights of the yearly activities of the INSME Association and it is composed of 3 or 4 day event, comprising the INSME Board Meeting and General Assembly, an International Conference, an International Training and Innovation Tours.

Submit your application to:

• play a protagonist role in an event welcoming more than 200 innovation stakeholders from all over the world;
• discuss the latest trends in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship;
• raise international awareness of the business attractiveness of your country.

Please express your interest by sending an e-mail to secretariat@insme.it.

Youth. Women. Entrepreneurship – understanding labour market policies across the G20

The G20 Labour Ministers’ meetings in Melbourne (2014), in Ankara (2015) and more recently in Beijing (2016) resulted in a series of commitments by Labour Ministers in the fields of employment, with a specific focus on youth, education, gender, occupational safety and health (OSH) and other policies. To monitor the implementation of these commitments, Deloitte, the International Organization of Employers and Business at OECD have undertaken two surveys, whose results can be found in the report “Youth. Women. Entrepreneurship – understanding labour market policies across the G20”.

Concerning youth employment, the report states that countries are addressing this issue mainly through structural reforms, including promoting mobility or increasing the quality and availability of apprenticeships and traineeships.

With regard to women, the challenges they mainly face are related to: a) affordability of childcare (with 27% of countries stating it is a challenge being addressed, while 60% said it is not); b) and achieving senior leaderships positions as just a little more than half of respondents (53%) stated there were laws supporting female share of executive positions in the public and private sector. Entrepreneurship is being recognized more and more as an important driver of innovation, job creation and growth.

Entrepreneurship seems to be increasingly included in the curricula, although this is most prevalent in the vocational sector (73%) while it is not foreseen in primary school (10%) and it is usually not included in teacher training programmes.

Find out more insights at this link.

Alternative Data Transforming SME Finance

Access to finance remains one of the major challenges to SMEs growth, survival and productivity both in developed and developing countries. In the world’s developing markets about half of the estimated 400 million SMEs still report a credit gap ranging from US$2.1 to US$2.6 trillion.

The reason behind SMEs’ limited access to finance lies on a double problem: on the one hand, many SMEs do not have access to credit due to documentation requirements to obtain a loan or high cost of interest rates, among others. On the other, many banks consider some SMEs as high-risk clients or high-cost clients to acquire.

Digitizing SME finance can be an opportunity to address both the demand and supply side problems. This report on "Alternative Data Transforming SME Finance" issued by the SME Finance Forum and the World Bank Group focuses on digital data for SME lending as a way to expand access to SME finance, including new uses of both traditional data (bank, accounting, transactional, and sales data) as well as alternative data (online ranking and social media, mobile, and individual data, such as psychometric testing). The publication also includes some key policy theme areas that should be considered and further discussed at the stakeholder level in order to enhance SME access to finance:

• Data privacy and consumer protection issues
• Opt-in as opposed to opt-out models
• Credit information sharing
• Cyber security and data
• Pricing transparency
• Balancing integrity, innovation and a competitive marketplace

To learn more and download the report, please click here.

‘Gender, Inclusive and Sustainable Industrial Development’ - an online course launched by UNIDO and UN Women

 

UNIDO (INSME Member) and UN Women have launched ‘Gender, Inclusive and Sustainable Industrial Development’, a new online training course that is part of the e-learning course I Know Gender.

By completing the 'Gender, Inclusive and Sustainable Industrial Development' module participants will be able to:

 

explain how women and men are differently affected by industrial policies;

contribute from a gender perspective to shared prosperity, economic competitiveness, and safeguarding the environment.

To access the module, it is necessary to first complete the three I Know Gender core modules, which explain basic gender concepts and international frameworks for gender equality. The course can be completed in one and a half hours.

More information about the module and the e-learning course is available at this page. To register please click here.

Find out more