WASHINGTON, DC — MARCH 26, 2026 — The Atlantic Council announced today a new five-year, $10 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to establish the Entrepreneurship Policy Initiative (EPI). This transformative effort within the Atlantic Council’s Freedom and Prosperity Center will strengthen the policies that enable entrepreneurs as well as small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to thrive and drive economic growth, particularly in developing and emerging economies.
EPI will develop a global entrepreneurship policy tracker measuring the policies that help or hinder entrepreneurship and the growth of SMEs in more than 100 countries. By tracking improvements in the business environment and identifying good practices, the initiative will provide an evidence base for reform and enable peer learning across countries.
To accelerate momentum for reform globally, EPI will also launch a global coalition for entrepreneurship policy, convening reform‑minded policymakers, private-sector partners, researchers, and advocates to exchange and advance entrepreneurship- and SME-centric policy reforms. The coalition will include a fellowship program designed to cultivate the next generation of leaders in entrepreneurship policy.
An independent academic board, hosted by Babson College and composed of leading scholars in economics, public policy, and regulatory governance, will oversee EPI’s methodology and data governance to ensure rigor, transparency, and integrity. The initiative will also leverage innovative artificial intelligence to improve the speed, scale, and accuracy of data collection and processing.
The Atlantic Council Freedom and Prosperity Center, under the direction of senior director James Mazzarella, will develop the policy tracker in two phases. The first three years will focus on methodology design and testing; beginning in year three, EPI will publish annual global data and analysis.
“The combination of rigorous research, innovative AI-enabled data collection, and a global coalition of reformers offers a powerful new model for driving evidence-based policy change,” said Frederick Kempe, president and CEO of the Atlantic Council. “The Atlantic Council is determined to be at the forefront of work intended to catalyze the reforms essential to driving global economic growth.”
“The pace of prosperity growth has slowed in many countries,” said Michael Fisch, chair of the Atlantic Council’s Freedom and Prosperity Center Advisory Council. “The funding from Templeton will allow us to provide policymakers and businesses with information they need to advance reforms and unlock broad-based economic opportunity.”
Greg Wolcott, director of Individual Freedom and Free Markets at the John Templeton Foundation said, “At the Templeton Foundation, we champion entrepreneurship because it allows people to build lives of meaning and purpose and contributes to individual and social prosperity. We also advocate for intellectual rigor in decision-making. EPI marries these priorities.”
The Freedom and Prosperity Center will develop and host EPI. The Center produces the Council’s flagship Freedom and Prosperity Indexes, which measures the impact of political, legal, and economic freedoms on prosperity and well-being in 164 countries. The new initiative will expand this portfolio by offering policymakers clear and actionable insights on the specific reforms that most effectively promote enterprise‑driven development and long-term prosperity.
EPI will officially kick off at the Freedom and Prosperity Center’s Global Prosperity Forum in April 2026. Its inaugural Entrepreneurship Policy Summit, including a global consultation process to inform the development of the policy tracker’s methodology, will take place later in the year.