Make Your Mark Blog

Put entrepreneurship centre stage in every sense of the word. That was the heartfelt plea from around 50 young business people, budding entrepreneurs and students who met the enterprise minister Stephen Timms at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in London yesterday.

It was a great meeting. We split up into 8 groups and brainstormed about what could be done to help foster the right conditions for young people to start a business and enable them to grow. My group of young entrepreneurs talked about putting entrepreneurship centre stage and addressing some of the issues with the following ideas:

• If you walk into careers service libraries across the country you will find there is little shelfspace on starting a business. Careers advisers should also be encouraged more to provide advice and guidance on entrepenuership.
• Most young people have little idea what it means to run a business (margins, cash flow, stock control, marketing strategy). Get young people to work for start-ups and small businesses to learn about how enterprise works; the government could support or incentivise interns on an enternship scheme.
• University funding is based on various criteria unrelated to stimulating entrepreneurship. Link funding to generating more start-ups!
• RDA funding criteria for innovative ideas do not appear to recognise new software applications. They don’t fit in the category ‘innovation’! If we want Britian to produce the next generation of ‘Facebook’ type developers we have to make it easier for them to receive funding for expensive product development.
• UK companies wanting to expand overseas sometimes get put off by lack of knowledge about the legal and cultural barriers; the government could create a one stop shop here or virtually to provide entrepreneurs with business and social-cultural advice and also a mini-incubation unit abroad, to dip your toe in the water.

The session was put on by Make Your Mark (www.makeyourmark.org.uk) to help provide the government with more views from young people on a range of topics from starting a business to getting support for business growth. The views are being collated by the department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (www.berr.gov.uk), as it writes the government’s new Enterprise Strategy, due out in the Spring.

If you are an entrepreneur and have any additional views on this you can log on to www.buildinganewenterprise.co.uk.

Dirk

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Entrepreneurship, Global Entrepreneurship Week, Innovation, Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.