Enterprise UK Blog

I had a Tenner-tastic afternoon at The Chase School in Malvern.  This group of young people are fairly new to Make Your Mark, but have opted to take part in Make Your Mark activity as part of their Young Chamber.

Part of the group were regionally shortlisted in the West Midlands Make Your Mark Challenge final and they’re taking Tenner just as seriously.  I was accompanied by Phillipa Charlesworth who runs JamboJambo – a company which provides employment for people in some of the worst slums of the world by selling their craftwork – beautiful handpainted bags and shoes made out of tyres!

The Yorkshire and Humber team had a great time attending Venturefest in York (a one day expo bringing together science, technology and knowledge entrepreneurs) this week as part of the Enterprise Inspirations exhibition.

Schools were very keen to find out about Make Your Mark with a Tenner and we look forward to receiving more of their registrations – Selby High School registered from the event!

We were also very pleased to see King James’s School from Knaresborough who were entering their idea from taking part in the Make Your Mark Challenge last year into a competition at the event. The team were inspired by the Make Your Mark Challenge – Use local inspiration to create a cool creation and have continued to turn their idea into reality…….

Hello to everyone registered for Make Your Mark with a Tenner (not registered yet? Make sure you do by Wednesday 17 February),

Wow!  I can’t believe that over 20,000 places have already been filled for this year’s Tenner.  It only seems like a few minutes ago that we opened for business!  It’s going to be a VERY busy couple of months at Tenner Towers!!!

Here are the main things I’ll be encouraging the judges to look out for this year;

1)    It takes real get-up-and-go to get out beyond the school gates and engage with your local community.  I’ll be especially impressed by anyone who does this!

Registration for Make Your Mark with a Tenner opened on 11 January and we’ve already pledged to give over 17,000 students £10 for the month of March so that they can come up with creative and enterprising ideas to make profit and make a difference.

That’s a lot of enterprising students but we’ve still got money to give, the piggy bank isn’t empty yet so find out more and get involved at www.enterpriseuk.org/tenner

New College in Pontefract and Wisewood School in Sheffield!

New College students excelled in the 16 – 19 category with PowerShoe, a kinetic energy harnessing device that utilises the wasted energy that is created everyday in the sole of our shoes.

Wisewood School took the regional title for the 14 – 16 category with H2 Power, a water turbine that is attached to a drainpipe so that when it rains, or when waste water runs through the drainpipe, it generates electricity that charges a portable battery.

There were some confused faces around the Nissan Manufacturing Plant yesterday as their site was invaded by a Polar Bear! Lucky for them this one was harmless and in fact wanted nothing more than to tell them all about Global Warming and protecting the environment.

Percy the Polar Bear is the main character in a series of locally set books developed by Northumberland Church of England School. The books use familiar local surroundings to hammer home the importance of looking after the places we love living in for the next generation.

Now, with just one day to go until our regional final of the Make Your Mark Challenge we really are on the edge of our seats and can’t wait to see our teams present their ideas.

Whilst we contain our excitement (just) we would like to thank all of our teams for the high standard of entries from schools and colleges across the Yorkshire and Humber region.

At times we really do wish that we could bottle the enthusiasm of our young people so that we could share all of their entrepreneurial spirit. But, we know we can’t, so instead take a look at our footage from the launch day. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

For me Global Entrepreneurship Week began and finished with teams of enterprising students, from the Make Your Mark Challenge launch in North Yorkshire through to Student Speaks in Wakefield.

Student Speaks was an opportunity for youngsters from secondary schools across the Wakefield district to be involved in GEW, discuss the theme ‘skills, enterprise and work’ and in particular have their say on what’s important to them. It was supported by Wakefield Together Partnership but planned by a group of students from Freeston Business and Enterprise College.

The dark and blustery November weather could not dampen the spirits of 200 enthusiastic pupils at Malet Lambert School in Hull this morning. This was no usual morning as the Make Your Mark Challenge 2009 was launched and the secret brief was unveiled ‘Let local inspiration lead you to a ‘cool’ creation.

The school hall became alive with energy and innovative ideas. The pupils were eager to join their teams and return to class and start the challenge. All wearing green T- Shirts, the pupils were also keen to prove that they were far from ‘carbon copies’ and made their mark styling their clothing. The teams were supported throughout the day by an array of business volunteers from local and regional organisations including Enterprise UK Ambassadors Phil Benson and Gerard Jones.

Today I have been at the GEW launch at the British Library, working with a school taking part in the Make Your Mark Challenge live at the event. Before The Challenge began, our Enterprise UK Ambassador Louis Barnett gave the students a large dose of inspiration by telling them about his entrepreneurial journey, which began when he was just 12 years old. They were then given their brief Let local inspiration lead you to a ‘cool’ creation, and quickly came up with an array of interesting and inspiring ideas.

Some of the students also got a chance to give Enterprise UK Chair Peter Jones a challenge of his own – see more photos here.

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.

Yesterday we told you all about our herculean efforts in staging a photoshoot with 180 school children to launch the Make Your Mark Challenge.

As we said yesterday, our idea was to 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.

Now we can show you the result, which – if we say so ourselves – is rather striking.

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.

Nominations for the Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion 2010 have now opened.  Lord Mandelson suggests that ‘recipients of The Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion (QAEP) are outstanding individuals who are inspiring tomorrow’s entrepreneurs and giving them the skills and attitudes they need to succeed’ and that ‘they hold the key to unlocking Britain’s entrepreneurial talents and they deserve all the praise and thanks we can give them.’

Last year’s winners of the Award included Make Your Mark Ambassador Jamie Murray-Wells and longstanding MYM friend Charles Cracknell, as well as others including lecturers, teachers and practitioners. If you feel that someone deserves recognition for their role in promoting enterprising skills and attitudes then nominate them now!

I rang a teacher friend of mine last night, who was enjoying a few drinks and a late night take away before having a long lie in this morning and then jetting off on a three week holiday this weekend. As I was battling with delayed tubes, flooded stations and the prospect of another day in a hot stuffy office I couldn’t help feel a bit jealous.