Make Your Mark Blog

One of our Ambassadors Beth Goddard shares her outlook on Womens enterprise day….

What do 6 foot 3d tree sculptures, balls of knitting and a random collection of multi-couloured canvases have in common? They were all used to uncover, develop and celebrate Girls! Making ideas happen of course…Wednesday 14^th November arrived with only a few problems, namely that our thought tree (see pics) looked more like a washed up piece of drift wood rather than an inspiring symbol of harvest and growth. Nothing that a little bit of tlc and foraging in the woods didn’t sort out and so we began the day at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park by embarking on a journey of discovery. We shared our ideas, our inspiration and our creativity by listening to guest speakers, engaging in creative networking activity and finally in creative workshops to put our new found inspired motivation into practice. We wrote stories about our past, created pictures of our present and developed visions of our future…From a co-ordination point of view this was unlike anything else that I have managed. The fact that it was a women’s event changed the emphasis of what we could do and it was refreshing to be in a group with a universal commonality – where we more open, did we engage with each other more, did we share more emotionally – and did that impact on our intended outcomes, of inspiring women to make ideas happen and celebrating our achievements to date? The feedback we’ve collected so far would suggest so! The only thing I hadn’t accounted for was just how much women like to talk…once you get them going, it’s difficult to get them to stop! Despite this, I feel proud of all the women who came and participated in the event. It was a joy to see them celebrating how wonderful they are and I know that many of them have got back out into the world ready to make their ideas happen. Brilliant!”

Check out Furness Enterprise’s blog post on what they got up to in EW 07!

http://www.gofurness.com/2007/11/15/business-rocks-at-the-canteen/

Wow, what a week we had last week. Very exciting, with fantastic events at every turn; we were all spoiled for choice at Make Your Mark with which ones to get along to.

I was involved in a few of the events, in particular a gaming industry round table kindly hosted by Elspa, and a Seedcamp winners talk that Sun Microsystems and Seedcamp facilitated.

The Elspa round table event took place last Tuesday, in the centre of Soho. We had representatives from casual games, games publishers, alternate reality games and industry bodies. The discussions lasted over 2 hours and we covered topics such as how to encourage more enterprise within big companies, as well as getting 14-30 year olds to think about setting up their own businesses.

The Seedcamp event was held on Thursday night in the London Bridge area and saw university students and budding entrepreneurs come and find out what makes the Seedcamp winners tick, and getting a chance to ask them questions, before they become the next Facebook or Google.

We had great feedback from both events, which were just two of the many events happening in the gaming and digital world. It’d be great to hear from anyone else who managed to get to any others.

I find it fascinating to hear how people’s Enterprise Week went. What worked, didn’t work, what will you remember?

Here is the stuff I’ve seen elsewhere so far - but PLEASE ADD YOUR OWN LINKS TO STUFF YOU’VE SEEN.

A busy week for those at Startups.co.uk -

http://www.startups.co.uk/6678842908765152474/behind-the-scenes-at-enterprise-week.html 

James at studentbeans http://www.studentbeans.com/blog/2007/11/18/enterprise-week-ftcom-changing-the-world/

David McQueen, Connector, http://davespeaks.wordpress.com/2007/11/15/enterprising-young-brits/

Cherie at Asthetico magazine (Nominee for Enterprising Young Brit!)http://aestheticamagazine.blogspot.com/

A teacher from Tobermory ( that sounds like it should be a Barry Mannilow song) http://lynnehorn.edublogs.org/2007/11/12/promoting-enterprise-the-tobermory-way/ and http://lynnehorn.edublogs.org/2007/11/18/studio-heads-snakes-and-a-dyson/

Your turn to add more…

My favourite event of the whole week! Make Your Mark organised an ‘Ideas Igloo’ at the Greenwich Community college. Pupils wrote their business idea on a card, which was collected. Those with the most inspiring ideas pitched them to a panel of entrepreneurs, a la Dragon’s Den. The ‘Dragons’ not only judged the idea, but also gave advice on next steps.

The ideas were absolutely great! I won’t put them all on here cos I don’t want anyone else to steal them The winner was Grace (see photo above), a super enthusiastic 19 year-old with learning difficulties who wanted to set up a recruitment agency to help people like herself find jobs. Her business idea included personalised help and follow-up for all applicants. I think she has found a niche in the market and what a fabulous idea for a social enterprise.

The enthusiasm by the pupils was overwhelming. I was even more impressed by their business ideas. Mine aren’t half as good….

Friday morning was a bit of a luxurous one, that is, after I managed to get through the mess on the train AND the Jubilee line…I stumbled into the Champagne Breakfeast, looking rather crumpled, right into a conversation with Tim Campbell!

James Caan then launched Brave New Enterprises, a new venture set up by Lucian Tarnowksi ( see http://www.makeyourmarkconnect.org/connector/show/704 and http://www.makeyourmark.org.uk/policy/future_face_of_enterprise/who_else/viewpoints/stoz/#ffoeluciantarnowski) to bridge the gap between Gen Y (first came the baby boomer, then Gen X, followed by Gen Y, ie young people born between 1978 and 1998).

 We had some very interesting round table discussion on stereotypes of young people. Our tables concluded that:

1 - Young people have more power now that in the 80’s (possibly because the labour market is tight and because we have an ageing population?)

2 - Stereotypes about India are widespread but not necessarily true. For instance, vast numbers of young people can’t read or write so social media isn’t going to change very much for them. Another example is that many large businesses are finding it impossible to set up projects in India because corruption is so widespread and this contradicts the business’ ethics.
We should also be careful not to impose our values on other countries, e.g. nomadic tribes in India are falling apart because the Government wants children to go to school, which means communities must be sedentary. Similar examples from Peru were mentioned.

3 - Employers in the UK are generally dissatisfied with young people - they can’t read, write and often don’t have the right attitude. Most of the table concurred with this point of view. Some people felt that while the baby boomers and Gen X had worked hard to earn respect, Gen Y sees it as their right.

4 - These days young people know a bit about a lot of topics but are not as likely to be expert in any particular subject.

5 - Setting up a business is not the way to go for all young people. It may be appropriate for top 10% in terms of skills and drive, but the middle 80% is probably happy just ticking along. These are the employees entrepreneurs need. We must also be careful not to leave behind the bottom 10% as the UK has the largest number of young people Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET) in Europe: a shocking 200,000.

So lots of food for thought!

M

On Thursday of Enterprise Week I was lucky enough to attend the Merseyside Enterprise Awards in the Palm House, Sefton Park. The winners, 10 boys from West Darby School, had come up with an idea for a University focusing entirely on green energy. They researched their idea thoroughly, e.g. by visiting existing universities. The boys’ University would sell its innovations to cover costs therefore having no/low tuition fees.

The comments of the winners, who got a £1000 check, showed just how much they got out of participating in the competition:

“Doing this build up my confidence immensely”

“Just the whole university experience makes you think about where you want to go”

“The competition really made us work as a team”

What a fantastic week…

I was fortunate enough to be founder of one of the five companies officially launching during Enterprise Week (Brave New Enterprises). The launch date - Friday 16th November or ‘Brave New Day’ has shaped the rest of my week. Lets start with where the week began and where it ended. For me Enterprise Week starting at the British Library with the official launch of the Week. The highlight of this was a line from Ben Verwaayen, Chief Executive of BT:
‘Talent has no passport, talent has no gender and talent has no age’
To me this sumarises what Enterprise Week is all about - every individual, not just in the UK but across the planet has the potential to be enterprising - some may find it easier than others but enterprise is certainly a global resource. Lets never forget that it is people that make businesses work and it is people that we need to invest in and encourage. This important point was made even clearer to me this week.

We live in an interesting time of phenomenal change. Oil stocks are depleting - indeed my generation will see global oil reserves dry up. Yet for me people are the oil of the twenty-first century. Indeed, it is people that lubricate the cogs of the global economy. At Brave New Enterprises our focus is not on finding undiscovered oil fields but rather on pointing our clients in the direction of fields of human talent. The most powerful message Enterprise Week has to the business world is ‘never cease mining human talent’.

Throughout the week I have met some highly talented people. I count myself very lucky to be in an industry where I can meet so many fascinating people. On Thursday I spoke at the worlds first Gen Y summit - ‘Ask Gen Y’. Gen Y, born between 1980 and 2000, are recognized as the most difficult workforce to manage. However, when companies get it right they can also be the most rewarding to the business. This summit had an important message to the business world - embrace the pace of change in the twenty-first century as that will ensure you attract and retain the best of Gen Y talent.

My Enterprise Week concluded yesterday on Brave New Day. This was the official launch date of Brave New Enterprises. I organized a ‘Forum of Leaders’ - business leaders engaging with future issues over the future face of enterprise and global issues facing the next generation. This was a fantastic success! The launch was attended by some of London’s most successful entrepreneurs including James Caan, Ben Way, Tim Campbell and Oli Barrett. The atmosphere and energy was contagious as the room of successful entrepreneurs confronted various global problems. Some really interesting opinions were given - one of the most important was about the general bad image young people have in the British media. Most of the attendees agreed that this was unhelpful and as a nation we need to promote young leaders to be examples to follow. It is needless to mention that never has a generation had so much weight on their shoulders.

Below: James Caan on the Brave New Day leaders panel

Below: Lucian Tarnowski with Tim Campbell

Below: a proud founder – Lucian Tarnowski after launch of Brave New Enterprises

Fortunately for me James Caan left the room saying ‘And Lucian, I’m in!’ I was extactic about the result of the day - I felt by engaging talent on global issues we created a can-do atmosphere to approaching global problems that it seems only enterprising individuals have. I ended my Enterprise Week sitting in the BBC 24 news room waiting to go live on air about Brave New Day and the conclusion of a very successful Enterprise Week. But alas, the Northern Rock crisis stole the limelight with a breaking news story. To me an enterprising Britain is far more important that the next disastrous turn with Northern Rock - but thats just my personal position!

All that there is left to say is lets look forward to next years Enterprise Week - this time a global Enterprise Week. And lets look forward to next years Brave New Day - a day focused on bridging the disconnection between young people and the business world.

Lucian Tarnowski, Founder of Brave New Enterprises - www.bravenewenterprises.com

Bob’s Blog Thursday 15th November 2007

To start the day I attended an amazing Year 11 Social Enterprise Assembly at Coundon Court School. The Assembly was to give out prizes and to celebrate the achievements of the students on this particular task. Each tutor group was targeted with coming up with enterprising ideas to raise funds for a local charity. Charity reps presented their causes (Coventry Refugee Centre, Coventry Disabled Enterprise Club, Help the Aged, RSPA etc.) and each group of students formed a committee with each member of the team taking on specific roles, duties and responsibilities. The students came up with some amazing ideas including a talent show ‘Coundon’s got talent’, a charity football match, a sweet shop and a balloon race. One group even managed to persuade a teacher to have his legs waxed – and people paid to watch the spectacle. A great example of young people having ideas, making them happen and having a real impact on the local community. They raised over £1,500 and the charity reps were delighted. Students from the school were invited to participate in the drive time business slot interview with Make Your Mark Ambassador and BBC Coventry and Warwickshire Radio Presenter Jane Vickers.

I then collected the two new members of the Make Your Mark in Coventry team, Lydiah Igweh and Leanne Bayley and the three of us went to visit Caludon Park. Caludon Castle School, Higham Lane School and Hartshill Schhol were working together on two challenges. The first involved cleaning up rubbish and preparing, painting and decorating a children’s play area. It was absolutely freezing and yet they were still working hard, smiling and having fun. In the afternoon the students were taking on a different challenge. They were going to use their IT and Media skills to design a flyer to promote Caludon Park and the castle remains.

Next stop was Broad Horizon’s Young Person’s Centre where once again a group of students were hard at work this time on an environmental challenge. Again there were some great ideas including fashions from recycled clothing, waste reduction and flood defense. It was great to again see make your mark ambassadors and connectors giving their time up to support Enterprise Week.

Friday 16th November 2007
Friday I started the day by joining Matt Newsom from our local SEEN spoke School and Sandra Stokes from the City Council in presenting an enterprise workshop at an inset day for local teachers. It was great to see that they are as enthusiastic and keen to generate ideas as the students they work with. We all had a go at an enterprise game called Lobster fishing, it is great fun, simple and gives an insight into decision making, calculating risk and some simple maths.

Then I was delighted to have another guest from Mercer Street and was joined by Jo Hill who was keen to get out and feel the buzz in Coventry. We went again to Broad Horizon’s Young Person’s Centre and joined the Lord Mayor of Coventry (Councillor Dave Batten), Elaine LeMontais (Midland Heart Housing Association), Fleur Sexton (Make Your Mark Ambassador), Pete Longden (Coventry Youth Service Enterprise Champion) and Zoe Bradley (Centre Manager) There was a mixed group of students from Centre 4, a local school for young people with behavioural difficulties and a group of disabled students from Hereward College. Everyone was having a great time and one of the supporters said that the barriers between able bodied and disabled young people are often put there by professionals rather than young people themselves. Interesting! They were all working on a networking challenge and to start the day we joined them in painting mugs with our own designs. Watch this space to see the designs that Jo and I came up with. The Mayor was so impressed with these young people that he was at the Centre for 3 hours.

I then took Jo to meet an amazing woman called Val Baker. Val supports Enterprise at Sherbourne Fields Special School and to bring Enterprise Week 2007 to an amazing end they were running a Christmas bazaar. The atmosphere in the room was amazing, the school mascot, Sherbee (A six foot bumble-bee) was wandering around and students had made items, set up stalls, raffles and competitions. They were also providing a gift wrap service. We met some great guys from Tesco Coventry who had donated a huge pile of toys to the school for them to raise funds and they told me that they had agreed to support the young people by selling bags that the pupils were going to make. These small calico bags were designed to hold about a dozen plastic carrier bags and shoppers could attach them to the trolley and reuse their carrier bags time and time again and get extra clubcard points. It was a pleasure and a privilege to be at the school and meet all these amazing students.

After a few more stop off’s I managed to catch the train and get to London for the wrap party. The bad news was that I arrived 5 minutes too late for the free bar. The good news was that we managed to get loads of people branded with Make Your Mark in Coventry temporary tattoos.

Post from Gemma at Frank.

Everyone at Frank PR is getting into the EW spirit, with a challenge we’ve named ‘Innovate or Vegitate’. The teams at Frank are competing head-to-head to come up with the best idea to let clients and potential clients know about two of our innovative services – Superfans^TM and Frank^CR. Everyone at every level – and even our Finance Team, Office Manager and Receptionist - are getting involvedTeams need to get their creative juices flowing during EW but have until 23 November to get their idea to the judging panel. Like all the best PR competitions, the winners will see their idea become a reality and may even reach the dizzy heights of local media coverage!To kick things off, we ‘enterprisingly’ enlisted the help of some ‘human statues’ who were in for a dress rehearsal for an event we’re running later this week.

To find out more about Frank, visit us at www.frankpr.it

alistair-mitchell-school-16-nov-07.JPG

Karen (from Brazil) and I went to Mitchell School in Stoke yesterdy and ending up playing against the students in the Trading game.  It was great fun. But we were disqualified; apparently we had broken our pencils and sharpened them at both ends.  We were booed at great volunme by over 100 kids! Over lunch a teacher came to find me to let me know that she had put two teams in the challenge on Monday.  Her verdict - it was fantastic!  More than that - she said that one of the ideas could be put into action straight away in the school and the other one was certainly doable.  They had also done MYM in 60 secs.  Its so great to hear feedback like that.

With funding secured, we progressed with renewed enthusiasm on all the hard groundwork with the help of our smashing project manager Kelly. We also finally got to the really rewarding stuff like developing the brand for BIG Juice, which was created by an amazing little agency called PS London. Like us, they were a start up and therefore understood the restrictions and challenges we were facing with having to tightly manage our budget. Regardless of our financial restrictions, they managed to deliver a cracking new brand platform, which was an amazing experience as it really did, for the very first time, allow us to see the business as more than just an entity - it was actually coming alive, it had a personality!

But probably the most rewarding and exciting project was the taste testing we ran. This was not just rewarding thanks to a roomful of people validating your product, but it really drove home how great my friends are and how important they have been in this process. It was important to us that we tested every product on our menu as thoroughly as possible before taking it to market.

Funds were tight and the possibility of running a formal taste testing session through a professional agency was zero due to the cost involved - so we had to be a little more creative. The end result was 40 of our friends and some of our professional suppliers (we even invited our bank contacts!) jammed into a funky café we hired on a Saturday, along with four borrowed blenders, a tired old juice extractor from home and boxes of ingredients, kindly donated by our soon to be regular supplier of fruit.

On top of that, the guys from PS London came along (with families in tow!) and took part in the tasting. They spent the day moving from group to group soliciting feedback on the brand work done so far, product names, colours and the menu formats that worked best.

All in all, it was a loooong day for all of us, including those who were strong and dedicated enough to spend the day tasting juice after smoothie – 50 of them in total – and for our project manager Kelly, who stayed preparing smoothies till the very end while looking not a day under 11 months pregnant at that stage!

But wow – on reviewing and analysing the formalised results (oh yes, 40-pages of questions for each taster!) it was so successful and one of the most valuable investments the business has made. It fundamentally shaped our product line, pricing, packaging and has even resulted new products as well. We also received a huge amount of validation. So whatever it is you’re doing, as much as possible, use your friends as a sounding board, but on the agreement that you’re looking for constructive truth, not flattery. As it turned out for us, they were our most important advisers!

We’ve collected loads of cool photos from the fabulous goings on during Enterprise Week:

http://www.makeyourmark.org.uk/news_and_features/galleries/72157602958736459

In terms of favourites, for me it’s a tie between the cute ickle toddlers at Hopscotch Nursery and Gordon Brown with what looks like a Global Enterprise Week halo during the launch of Global Enterprise Week!!

What’s your fave?

My goodigumdrops, boy, I’m tired. What a week! Being around so many inspirational people all week has left me all out of Beatles song titles. massive thanks to everyone who has made it such a great and inspiring week! It really does get you thinking about changing the world!

The task now of course is to show everyone that Enterprise is not just for Christmas, it’s a way of life. (but let’s have a few beers first hey and get to this on Monday…)