Program · Advocacy
Where, concretely,
does it hurt?
BE.Entrepreneur is Pulse's policy work: entrepreneurs, researchers and investors in one room, turning what actually blocks them into recommendations that reach decision-makers.
The record
What the work has produced.
- 60+
- Entrepreneurs, researchers and investors in the room
- 25
- Recommendations, published in full
- 3
- Axes: Boost, Enable, Educate
- 2
- Editions, 2024 and 2026
The 2024 report
Boost, Enable, Educate.
Twenty-five recommendations for a more entrepreneurial Belgium, on three axes. Boost: make the state a first customer rather than only a funder. Enable: get research to market faster. Educate: build the skills and the appetite years before anyone starts a company. Every one of the twenty-five is documented, and most are drawn from something already working elsewhere in Europe.
It was not written by a committee. More than sixty entrepreneurs, researchers, investors and mentors, from both sides of the country and from social enterprise to deep tech, met in two collective working sessions and answered one practical question: where, concretely, does it hurt? Months of research on Belgian and international practice were built on their answers, and three priorities were pulled out of the twenty-five.
The timing was the point. Belgium voted in June 2024 and formed governments afterwards, at federal and regional level. The report went out in April 2024 as a memorandum: on the table while the party programs were being written, addressed to the people who would write them. Pulse Foundation and Belgium's 40 under 40 carried it, with the Itinera Institute co-writing the first edition.
An initiative of
Download
The report, in full.
Twenty-five recommendations and the research behind them, in French and in Dutch.
Two years later
From recommendations to policies.
In 2024 we said we would come back in two years and check. On 20 April 2026, at TheMerode in Brussels, the same ecosystem sat down to do exactly that: what moved, what stalled, and what still needs a decision.
On stage in April 2026
- Eléonore SimonetFederal Minister for the Self-Employed and SMEs
- Julie LietaerCEO, European Spinning Group
- Céline NaveauCo-founder and CEO, Semactic
- Max LevandowskiChief Business Officer, Poppy Mobility
- Luigi SementilliModerator
In 2024 the recommendations were put to a political panel that closed the session: Alexia Bertrand, Barbara Trachte, Thomas Dermine and Yvan Verougstraete.
20+of the 89 measures in the federal SME plan
The federal SME plan of January 2026 is the clearest single example. Of its 89 measures, more than twenty come straight from the BE.Entrepreneur report of 2024.
| Recommendation | FED | FL | WL | BR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Public procurement for innovation, open to SMEs | Federal: Taken up | Wallonia: Partly taken up | ||
| Student-entrepreneur status | Federal: Taken up | Wallonia: Taken up | ||
| Simplified company creation | Federal: Partly taken up | Flanders: Taken up | Wallonia: Partly taken up | |
| Regulatory sandboxes | Federal: Taken up | Flanders: Taken up | Wallonia: Partly taken up | |
| Easier spin-off creation (deal terms principles) | Federal: Taken up | Flanders: Partly taken up | Wallonia: Partly taken up | |
| Dormant patents opened as open source | Federal: Taken up | |||
| Project-based learning in education | Federal: Taken up | Flanders: Partly taken up | FWBBrussels: Partly taken up (FWB) | |
| A new VAT number after a bankruptcy | Federal: Taken up | |||
| Attracting international talent (global talent stream) | Federal: Taken up |
Nine of the 25 recommendations, not all of them. A blank cell means the source records nothing at that level, which is not a refusal.
Next step
Read it, or help move it.
The dossier is published in our resources library. If you work on these rules, in an institution or in a company, we want to hear from you.
