World Bulletin / News Desk

Turkey will provide techno-entrepreneurship to 500 people every year and will send ten techo-entrepreneurs to San Francisco's Silicon Valley to improve their projects, Turkish Science, Industry and Technology Minister Nihat Ergun said on Wednesday, while encouraging innovation projects at the 3rd Techno-Entrepreneurship Summit in Istanbul.

Noting that 300 people had received techno-entrepreneurship support last year, Ergun said such efforts "started accelerating the reversal of brain drain" in the country.

"We received techno-enterpreneurship support from the Industry Ministry in 2011 and we've developed a software project as a result of it," said Alper Kilic, who stressed that entrepeneurs would receive experience in Silicon Valley.

"Our aim is to make our product global and find a market to export it," Kilic added.

"We hope we will return with good investments and job offers. To represent Turkey with these projects in the US will also be very important for Turkey's image," Afsin Kemal Dumlupinar, another entrepreneur, told AA.

"We attach importance to youth, who created their jobs thanks to this program. We are following them closely. This program brings together the two vital subjects of innovation and entrepreneurship," Minister Ergun said.

The Techno-Entrepreneurship program, on which the ministry has spent 100 million Euros since its start in 2009, has supported 1,034 people thus far.