Enterprise UK Blog

‘IF WE CAN, YOU CAN’ Challenge launches for 2010

Today marks the launch of the third ‘If we can, you can’ Challenge, a region-wide competition set to re-ignite and celebrate North East England’s entrepreneurial spirit.

The  Challenge calls upon any individual who is thinking of starting a business, running their own business or looking to grow their existing enterprise to enter the Challenge and log on to tell their story – adding to a growing online community of entrepreneurs, each at different stages of their journey. The campaign is built on the Entrepreneurs’ Forum’s well established principles of peer-to-peer support, where personal stories and guidance from experienced current business owners help nurture budding and existing entrepreneurs.

The lovely folks at Adnams Brewery have come on board to help potential entrepreneurs spark their ideas!

As part of a series of free events run by Enterprise UK, The King’s Head in Woodbridge and The Butt and Oyster at Pin Mill are both hosting events, aimed at people who want to start their own business and turning their dreams into a reality.

Speaking at the events will be local business duo Paddy Bishopp and Scott Russell (of Paddy and Scotts coffee).

Those attending the events will also:

• hear how entrepreneurs from Suffolk started their own business.

If you had the backing of a leading enterprise charity, four major business organisations and a highly successful entrepreneur, what ideas would you put forward to make the UK a world leader in enterprise?

Enterprise UK, its Chair Peter Jones, the Institute of Directors, the British Chambers of Commerce, the Confederation of British Industry, and the Federation of Small Businesses are launching a collaborative manifesto for entrepreneurship. It is an online space where entrepreneurs from any industry sector, geographical region or stage of business development can submit and rate innovative and practical enterprise policy ideas.

Yesterday was a Tuesday.

Tuesday is famed for many things – There’s Shrove Tuesday, Ruby Tuesday, Tuesday’s Gone (a la Lynyrd Skynyrd), PE day at Bagshot First School (although maybe that just applies to me)…

Yesterday (Tuesday 12^th January) it became famous for something else.. The launch of Enterprising Young Brits 2010!!!

I was there, along side our partners, supporters and many of our brilliant Enterprise UK Ambassadors. We listened to speeches from our very own Scott Cain, Miles Templeman Director General of the Institute of Directors, and EUK Ambassador and EYB 2009 winner Priya Lakhani the founder of Masala Masala cooking sauces.

Inspired by Global Entrepreneurship Week a group of UK entrepreneurs have decided to sell the world’s first 24 Hour Start Up on ebay! From 12.00 today a yet to be created business was listed for sale that will continue to develop over the next 24 hours.

Nonsense London and White October have given themselves a day to create a business  from scratch. A crack team of sleep-deprived entrepreneurs. creatives, designers and developers will be conceiving, designing, developing and branding a web-based business. which they’ve listed for auction on eBay.

What do you get when you mix some generous local business owners, some inspirational enterprise coordinators, some very tolerant teachers and a whole bunch of enthusiastic school children? Well in Wansbeck; it’s called the Make £5 Grow Challenge and it’s all part of the Wansbeck Enterprise Education Network’s Global Entrepreneurship Week festivities!

This year around 50 local businesses are sponsoring hundreds of school children £5 each and they have just 4 weeks to make as much profit as possible. Sounds simple!

Today I met Lindsey Dunn from the Wansbeck Enterprise Education Network at Guide Post Middle School in Northumberland for a unique meeting between 25 teachers and a host of local business owners. This was the first meeting of many between the two parties as they embark on the Global Entrepreneurship Week Make £5 Grow Challenge.

The project sees school children aged 7-17 from the Wansbeck area given £5 to either go it alone, or work with friends to turn their £5 into as much profit as possible. The money has been donated by nearly 50 local small businesses all keen to encourage an entrepreneurial spirit in their young people.

Exposure is good. Not the sort that gets you arrested, but the sort that encourages others to take their dreams and turn them into a labour of love: something sustainable and enriching. In other words, to be enterprising.

Our latte-sipping, long-word using, thinking-cap wearing policy boffins have established that exposure to entrepreneurial behaviour is strongly related to an individual’s desire to start a business. Any initiative that can spark enterprise in others is, to use the contemporary parlance, totally awesome.

We’re in the fortunate position of coming across a lot of enrepreneurial talent during the course of our work here at Enterprise UK. Few talents, however, have been as precocious as young Jemma Rogers.

Jemma Rogers – a Year 11 student at St. Edmunds School in Sailsbury – is an aspiring photographer. She – being entrepreneurial and all – liked the idea of the Make Your Mark Challenge so much that she decided to take some special photos to promote its launch at her school. The below – rather nifty – photos focus on an appropriately green theme, given the nature of this year’s challenge.

Last night I spoke to one of my friends, a recent graduate, who has been unemployed for a number of months – a situation I remember well after leaving University, unlike my contemporaries, without a job in the city lined up. We chatted about the sense of worthlessness, the fear and panic that at not having money coming in, and the difficulty in knowing who to turn to. Whatever the latest stats on youth unemployment (out next month) are – they won’t show the real effect that this these problems are having.

This morning the redoubtable Make Your Mark comms and education teams – together with a little help from our friends at Threepipe – assembled on Blackheath Common in south London to stage an ambitious photo shoot with 180 schoolkids to launch the Make Your Mark Challenge.

We wanted our launch photograph to encapsulate in a visual and memorable fashion the key concepts that will underpin this year’s Challenge: low-carbon enterprise and environmental responsibility. The concept we hatched was simple: gather a huge group of school students into a large footprint and photograph them from above. The footprint image would allude to the concept of a ‘carbon footprint’ as well as the notion of Making Your Mark (in this case with a footprint) through enterprise and individual initiative.

Rejoice! The recession is over, at least according to data released by the – long acronym alert- NIESR (National Institute of Economic and Social Research), which shows that GDP rose by an estimated 0.2 per cent in the three months to August.

So, that’s it folks! Well done: we can all stop worrying.

Or can we? Alex Brummer – City Editor for the Daily Mail – warns us not to pop the corks just yet.  In his view, unemployment will remove a great deal of spending power and suppress consumer demand.

New research from the Careers Advice Service sheds some light on the career aspirations of kids.

Apparently, girls want to be teachers when they grow up and boys want to be footballers - this will come as a surprise to no-one who has had to spend a rainy, mud-soaked afternoon kicking a half-deflated football around with an over-excited toddler.

It is, however, good to see that kids are almost as likely to want to emulate Richard Branson and Peter Jones as they are the likes of David Beckham and Ronaldo. Entrepreneur was the second most popular dream job for boys and the fifth most popular dream job for girls.

At Make Your Mark Towers, we like to think of ourselves as collection of youthful, sprightly folk. Accordingly - consistent with a tradition that has been passed down from one generation of young people to another – we can occasionally be heard grumbling about the parents. Personality defects? We blame the parents; sloppy habits? We blame the parents.

Enough.

Our ongoing Parents campaign should put to rest such ungrateful, ill-founded grumbles. 

The feedback we have recieved from entrepreneurs who have engaged with the campaign – on Twitter, on the forum, and on this very blog – has highlighted just how big a source of support parents have been for those taking their first, tentative, entrepreneurial steps. 

As our avid followers – addicted to the wit and wisdom of MYM’s finest – will know, we have just launched a sparkly campaign focusing on the key role that parents can play in encouraging and supporting young peoples’ enterprising ambitions.

Needless to say, support networks – within which parents play a key role – are an important asset in the armoury of any would-be entrepreneur. From words of encouragement, advice, to – hold your hand up parents – cleaning up after you when your fledgling entrepreneurial activities have left you exhausted, support of all stripes and colours is invaluable.