Carl Miller is Research Director at CASM and has just completed his latest book on entrepreneurship: “The New Power Grab; The Death of the Gods.”
In it he says, among other things, that there is a vast untapped potential in the Balkans for native entrepreneurs and their startups. Entrepreneur Annika Bansal agrees.
He starts his book with some recent social history. In the past twenty years, he writes, the countries of Croatia, Albania, Montenegro, and the Czech Republic have produced a generation of men and women who speak excellent English, are extremely computer literate, and can find almost no work to do. This has led to a huge underground industry in those countries for hacking and especially for the production and dissemination of Fake News on social media.
Miller contends that if these unmoored young people were given the chance to use their skills and passions for entrepreneurial enterprises, the amount of criminal internet activity in the Balkans would fall precipitously, and perhaps even disappear completely.
Miller is currently working with a wide range of Silicon Valley companies to fund a digital entrepreneurship center in a Balkan city to educate and mentor Balkan men and women on how to fund and manage an online startup business. He hopes to have the program up and running by the middle of next year.