Enterprise UK Blog

In 2008 we (Enterprise UK – or Make Your Mark as we were known back then) published ‘The Future Face Of Enterprise’, a collection of viewpoints. We asked over 50 entrepreneurs, business people, industry experts, social commentators, academics what they thought would shape the future face of enterprise in the UK.

Two years later and we’re now collating views and opinions for the Enterprise Manifesto - which is intended to inform politicians and policy-makers of what the enterprise community thinks they need in order to flourish in today’s challenging times.

I wonder how many of those original view points still stand today?

‘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.

Over 500 delegates attended 2 events being run simultaneously in York yesterday aimed at inspiring exisiting and budding entrepreneurs in the creative and cutlrual sector. York St John University triumphed with key note speaker Wayne Hemingway who recounted his enterprise journey from market stall to B&Q’s best selling shed via the fashion label Red or Dead. He urged delegates to leave the world a better place than they found it and suggested that the role of the creative mind is to make lives better. Creative entrepreneurs shared their knowledge of a wide range of topics including intellectual property and networking. Meanwhile at The Hospitium students were accessing support from EUK, Business Link and others and being learning about creative businesses ranging from magic to graphic design. I was privileged to be asked to round the day off by congratulating all the organisers and partcipants and suggesting that York should be an entrant to the Enterprising Britain competition this year.

This weekend I went back to where I grew up to join the family business in celebrating their latest achievement. My parents and brother run a garden centre and this weekend they opened their new retail shop, an impressive 1200 square metres of barn-style building complete with underfloor heating and impressive ranges of giftware, clothing and garden furniture.

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.

Does the Enterprise Village have a fertile garden?

1. Escape to the Garden of England

Having pulled myself from my desk, various meeting rooms and the ever present threat of a fatal email avalanche I made time to visit an Enterprise Learning Partnership (ELP) meeting at Fulston Manor School in Sittingbourne; hosted by the impressive Karen Fingland and Rebecca Dighton

No more ivory-tower pondering, time to see how teachers in Kent are nurturing budding entrepreneurs of the future. Is the enterprise spirit blossoming in the Garden of England?

2. A cry for ‘ELP

Well according to Ganesh Selvarajah, an adviser at the government-backed business support service Business Link, the holy grail for small retailers is knowing how to target new customers. He directly answers a question about this on the BBC website and he makes some interesting suggestions to one small business owner about the demographics of the area they live in, and the potential of targeting the Eastern European community.

As a marketeer by profession I probably spend more time than most thinking about audiences – both potential audiences and those which aren’t worth bothering about which is equally important to consider. 

Last week I managed to bag myself a ticket to the media140 Third Sector event held at We Are Social in London. The event focused on how Social Media is and can be used in third sector organisations with talk and debate from leading advocates in the industry. Safe to say being a bit of a social media geek I lapped up the opportunity to engage with like minded thinkers and was interested to see how charities and organisations across the spectrum of size and notoriety approached this. Here were some of things I took away..

None of us can have escaped the devastation caused by the earthquake in Haiti over the last few weeks.
Our friends at Save the Children have come up with a truly unique way of raising money for Haiti’s children, teaming up with corporate partners and utilising social media to create a business competition.

The Business Heroes campaign (www.businessheroes.org.uk) gives companies or individuals the chance to test their business skills by coming up with the idea that raises the most money for the charity.

Three of our Enterprise UK Ambassadors have had their entrepreneurial talent recognised and rewarded at the third annual Northwest Women in Business Awards.

Best Young Entrepreneur WINNER – Anna Heyes

Best Young Entrepreneur RUNNER UP – Lucy Byrne

Best Start Up Business RUNNER UP – Vicky Corcoran

Congratulations to all of you!

For more details about this years awards go to www.nwda.co.uk/news–events/press-releases/201001/women-in-business-awards.aspx

A new batch of statistics were released by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor last week that together gave a fairly comprehensive view of the current state of global enterprise.

The headline figure - showing that fewer people in the UK had expressed an interest in starting and investing in a new business in the past year - was ostensibly discouraging. 

A closer look, however, revealed that Britain’s commitment to entrepreneurialism withstood the challenges of the recession as well as, if not better, than many of her competitors. For example, although Britain saw a six per cent decline in new start ups in 2009, this compared favourably with a decline in Germany of nine per cent, and a decline in the United States of 24 per cent.

Well, we are all aware of the havoc that has been caused by the snow and ice over the last couple of weeks but here in Yorkshire we thought it was the perfect opportunity to look to the positive – yes there is one… home working!

Many of our ambassadors are successful home workers. Nadine Hill from The Dream PA and Dr Mah from Saaf Pure Skin Care have turned their ideas into reality without leaving their front door.

So, we’re back at work: it’s January, it’s cold, and Christmas has become a dim and distant memory.

The new year and return to work often serves as the occasion for some serious navel-gazing and introspection, which leads to the annual parade of resolutions, targets, and reinventions.

If you are one of the many pondering the year ahead and, perhaps, thinking about taking your life in a different direction you could do a lot worse than starting your own business.