The 10 Million Entrepreneur Initiative: A Proposed Aegean Programme

The 10 million entrepreneur initiative is a proposed long-horizon programme within the Aegean Council framework. Its aim is simple: make starting and operating a business across the Aegean Sea as ordinary as operating within one country.

It is a proposal, not a funded or operating programme. It is described here so that policymakers, businesses and researchers can assess it.

What the programme would consist of

• Cross-border company incorporation with a single digital process recognised in both countries.
• Mutual recognition of professional qualifications, so skills transfer without re-certification.
• Shared customs documentation and digital trade manifests, reducing the cost of small cross-border shipments.
• Joint research and commercialisation funding between universities on both sides of the sea.
• A common framework for young founders, apprenticeships and language exchange.
• Access to a shared digital and data layer, AIgean, for trade, logistics and secure exchange.

Why entrepreneurship, and why this scale

Institutional peace holds longest where large numbers of people have a direct economic stake in it. A framework that only ministers use is fragile. A framework that millions of small businesses depend on becomes difficult to unwind.

The figure expresses ambition across the combined population of both countries over a decade of phased implementation, not a forecast. In the proposed roadmap the initiative reaches critical mass in the expansion phase, in years five to ten.

How it depends on the institutions

None of it works without the underlying architecture: an inter-parliamentary assembly to legislate in parallel, ministerial councils to coordinate execution, a permanent secretariat to provide continuity between elections, and sectoral committees to do the technical work. That is the architecture the Nordic Council has run since 1952, and the architecture the Aegean Council proposal adapts.