Make Your Mark Blog

My Mum is a Deputy Headteacher at a special school for children with cerebral palsy in West Sussex - Ingfield Manor. About a month ago during our planning for Enterprise Week, it was suggested that I get the school involved in an event during the week. We came up with an activity within our sector - manufacturing & engineering - called ‘Making it Better’. The activity involved redesigning and developing existing products and ‘making them better’ to suit the children’s individual needs. The children involved in the event were aged 6-12.

I have to say that I was overwhelmed by the success of the activity yesterday and I was completely taken aback by the productiveness of the children. The winning ideas were a flexible, adaptable, lightweight mirror with handles and two different bases to fit on the equipment that the children already use. And a piece of equipment which will enable the children to put tops (clothing) on almost independently. The model has a frame which a t-shirt/jumper can be stretched over which is then raised above the head and brought down onto the body.

The day was a complete success and proved that children of any age and ability can be Enterprising!

Pictures and short film to follow!

Becca (Make your Mark in Manufacturing & Engineering)

What an inspiring event! Established young entrepreneurs such as Jamie Murray Wells turned up to see the cream of young entrepreneurial talent at the awards in the Hyatt hotel.

Inventions such as chocolate boxes to cover chocolate – Louis Barnett, Choclit - (which caught my greedy imagination) as well as more socially-conscious businesses such as Nathaniel Peat’s The Safety Box, which confronts violence in schools by teaching personal safety and martial arts as well as conflict resolution were original ideas that were also commercially successful. I imagine that everyone that attended the event left with a resurged determination to push forward their own business and make their ideas into a reality.

The prizes were given out by the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, and Gordon Brown PM crashed the event at the end. He attended last year as Chancellor, and was clearly unable to keep away from such an inspiring event!

See more about the amazing people and their ideas on http://www.makeyourmark.org.uk/get_involved/enterprising_young_brits/2007_finalists

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

…into Science, Engineering Technology Careers (SET)…. Sorry if you were hoping this post was about dating…!
Yesterday I attended a conference about how to get more women into SET careers - not something I knew anything about previously but I now feel I am a bit of an expert (and considering a possible career change!) I met lots of interesting people and heard from a really inspirational woman - Maggie Aderin - who works in Physics, has appeared on numerous TV shows and set up her own company (Science Innovations Ltd) and whose ambition is to set Big Brother on Mars (eviction would mean living out the rest of your days on Mars!).

To find out more, visit: www.setwomenresource.org.uk

Future Face of Enterprise

What do you think the future face of enterprise will look like? What are the possiblities, opportunities and trends that will shape enterprise? Please join the debate and let us know what you think in 300 words and email them to policy@makeyourmark.org.uk along with your name, job title, organisation, and picture.

Popping into the start of the future face of enterprise conference, you could be forgiven for thinking that the future face of enterprise is a forty-year old Caucasian. Commentators on business are usually very well-educated and insightful, but do conform to stereotype. The first panel (Jonathan Guthrie – Enterprise Editor, Financial Times, Ben Verwaayen and Rt Hon John Hutton MP, Secretary of State for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform) pleased the audience with their witty panel discussion and answered questions well, from an audience with much more variation in appearance.

However, the panel of entrepreneurs soon put a stop to a complaint about lack of diversity. Dominated by women, with only two male ministers present, the image of the future face of enterprise was young, vibrant and an ethnic mixture. The second panel (Lucy Neville-Rolfe - Tesco plc, Joanna Shields - Bebo, Phil Hope - MP, Stephen Timms - MP, Maive Rute - European Commission, Julie Meyer - Ariadne capital, Farzana Baduel - TaxClaim) held a show-stopping discussion with the audience, and all gave their views on a variety of questions from recommendations for enterprise education to a discussion on why British women don’t set up businesses at the same rate as British men.

After having committed to each other that we would together build the biggest and most loved network of Juice and Smoothie bars in the UK, my business partner and I had to bring ourselves slowly down off the high of having made the decision to change our lives by building something for ourselves, and face the enormous task of actually building this otherwise imagined business, literally from nothing.

Living without an income for what turned out to be two years was simply not an option, so we both had to remain in full time employment while starting the business to a point where it could support us. Therefore, we were forced to make some tough decisions about how we were going to spend our time, and on what exactly. In hindsight, I can say that we completely underestimated how hard it was going to be to achieve a workable balance. Both of our jobs were quite demanding, and weekends were, as anyone who works fulltime knows, precious beyond value!

The first flurry of activity lasted a few months and saw ideas finally put to paper. A name agreed, the company registered, many inspiring and seemingly productive debates over great bottles of wine on what would be our point of difference (not to mention secretly doodling stationery designs when we probably should have been researching suppliers). But we very quickly came to the realisation that if we continued hypothesising without action, this business was forever going to remain a dream.

(more…)

If ever a day fell firmly into the “weird and wonderful” category this was it! At 9am this morning, I was standing outside a fog-bound old theatre in Lowestoft waiting to judge a Dragons Den style pitch, and at 9pm tonight was sitting in a room of 200 women at a fashion show next to Anfield stadium in Liverpool. For me, this summed up Enterprise Week perfectly - massively different events, from one end of the country to the other - but with a common theme: young people following an ambition or idea to make it happen.

The day started in a cold, grey and freezing Lowestoft in a scene reminiscent of something from Little Britain: I found the Seagull Theatre, a renovated old building not much bigger than a squash court, but the coach bringing the Make Your Mark with a Tenner finalists broke down and the 6 judges and gathered adults spent 45 minutes mingling. When the kids arrived, they were excited - nine teams would be pitching their ideas for starting a business with £10 - to a Dragons Den style panel of local judges. The old theatre made a great backdrop - the red velvet seats and black stage added to the tension! One by one, the teams came forward, outlined their plans and took questions from the judges and audience.
(more…)

Gordon Brown launched global Enterprise Week literally minutes ago.

Ten countries are on board already, ranging from India, to the US to China. Twenty-six countries are at the Global Enterprise Workshop today, covering coalition building, obtaining sponsorship, social media, and, most importantly, how to reach out to young people and help them to turn their ideas into reality.

The enthusiasm of the participants is truly contagious!

Think of it, we have over 5000 events taking place nationwide this year in the UK…how many could we get globally? Tens of thousands!

Right, better get going as we are starting a brainstorming session on ideas for events and activities for Global Enterprise Week…

How’s this for smart branding - the lovely sheep in the video in the link below are being used to promote www.makeyourmarkinfashion.org and belong to Makepiece - one of the competition’s partners. I love it!

Well a minute obviously but for our four young social entrepreneurs who recently pitched their ideas to Tim Campbell, Emily Eavis and Peter Jones as part of Make Your Mark in 60 Seconds (soon to launch at www.bebo.com/60seconds) I’m sure the 60 Seconds in which they had to pitch wasn’t long enough and also seemed like an eternity all at the same time.

We did the filming in what will be the new offices of Social Enterprise Magazine and has been an old print factory near London Fields. With coffee and croissants in abundance we set ourselves up. I myself was nestled at the back of the filming with a stopwatch and was really impressed with the young entrepreneurs who showed immense confidence in their ideas and for some of them a real desire to use their own experiences to help other people. For example, Ryan was bullied at school but wants to set up a youth radio station to help others in similar situations - for a 17 year old that’s pretty impressive!

As for our celebrity ‘feedbackers’ it was great to see them in action and alas I don’t have a harsh word to say (which I know would make this more interesting!). Peter Jones had very a direct approach to feeding back his thoughts which was refreshing - young people shouldn’t be patronised and it is important that they recognise any pitfalls in their plans sooner rather than later. I hope they all learn something from the experience, whoever wins the public vote.

And my highlight of the day? Finding out that Mark who pitched an idea to set up a Liverpool Culture Cafe to help disadvantaged youngsters had also been shortlisted for our Enterprising Young Brits awards, for another venture he is involved in. Clearly he is going places and it should be a great week for him, whether he wins or not.

The Harvard Business Review included an article this month arguing that experts are made, not born. It presents evidence from a variety of studies looking at elite performers who have won international competitions in fields ranging from music and the arts to mathematics and neurolology. A couple of findings I thought were interesting:

• None of the studies were able to identify indicators in young people that predict success later in life
• There is no correlation between IQ and expert performance in fields such as chess, music, sports and medicine

What does seem to be common amongst all the highly successful people they studied is that they have all devoted thousands of hours developing their skills. Importantly, this involves “deliberate” practice - not just practicing the same things over and over again, but practice that constantly tests and expands skills and abilities. It’s the kind of practice where you force you to do things just outside of your competence.

It also involves seeking out teachers and mentors. The article says:

“The development of expertise requires coaches who are capable of giving constructive, even painful feedback. Real experts are extremely motivated students who seek out such feedback. The elite performers we studied knew what they were doing right and concentrated on what they were doing wrong”

“The research also shows that even the most gifted performers require about 10 years (or about 10,000 hours) of intense training before they win international competitions. In some fields, apprenticeship takes longer: it now takes most elite musicians 15 to 25 years or steady practice, on average, before they succeed at the international level.”

The relevance to the MYM campaign? There have been news items like this arguing that entrepreneurial skill is innate, and that support agencies should screen clientele to identify the most promising candidates and turn away the less promising ones. From our campaign’s perspective, I think such reporting can easily discourage people from even bothering. Worse, it provides publicly-funded business support services with excuses for not providing adequate services to the range of clients that come through their doors (e.g., “sorry, I know we haven’t met our targets, but there weren’t enough natural entrepreneurs coming through this quarter”).

Rather than tell all but those who meet some set of criteria not to bother, shouldn’t we instead be informing young people about what it really takes to become a success and be realistic about the time and effort it will take to get there, so those who want to will get on to the path?

Here’s a poll you can take part in to find the UK’s most inspirational business leaders. http://www.edgeupstarts.org/2007/eu07poll.php

Whilst I accept that age and experience can count for a lot I really hope that this poll throws up some exceptional young business leaders. I’m fed up of seeing Richard Branson and Anita Roddick on these kinds of lists. I don’t dispute that they are successful and that we can learn a lot from them. But I do think that young people need to hear about new business role models. So if you know someone young and inspirational please do nominate them!

The Connectors group is currently at 44, with another 26 potentials outstanding from the hubs. I’m really hoping to get it over 100 in the next 2 weeks.

Has anyone got any ideas?

We’ve got a meeting taking place in Wakey (well, Leeds actually, but its close to Wakey) on the 1st March for our Northern Connectors, and the last London meeting drew in over 20 people. You can see the latest lot at http://www.starttalkingideas.org/next_steps/networks/make_your_mark_connectors

This is a blog that is intended to be a resource and place of interest for people who have ideas and want to make them happen.

It’ll be an informal collection of news, photos, links, thoughts, things we’ve seen, and anything else we think might be of interest.

Hope you enjoy it.

Ed