Events
Ambassador Cain Talks Entrepreneurship at Børsen's Gazelle Awards
SAS Radisson, Amager
September 28, 2006
Ambassador Cain was the keynote speaker at the Børsen “Gazelle” awards ceremony in Copenhagen on September 28. The awards honor Danish entrepreneurs.
In his remarks the Ambassador described how heavily the United States relies on its small and medium-sized businesses to create jobs and pointed out how Americans consider risk taking a positive quality and the sometimes resulting business failure not something to stigmatize.
On a broader level, Ambassador Cain stressed the transformational power of entrepreneurs: "When we encourage one to pursue his or her own economic self-interest, for purposes of individual reward and individual achievement, whether the reward is monetary, psychological, charitable or otherwise, we create a motive and a condition for freedom and political stability to flourish. In this way entrepreneurship can be a new idiom for our foreign policy, not to replace the idiom of democracy and freedom, but to enhance it."
“Gazelle” is a term coined by the Danish business newspaper Børsen to describe companies fulfilling the following criteria: turnover of more than 1 million DKK or a gross profit of over one-half million DKK in all of the last four years; positive growth in turnover/gross profit in each of the last three yearly accounts; and net positive results over the last four years.
Click here for the Ambassador's remarks at the event.