Entrepreneurship - Dynamite Comes in Small Packages - The Future Face of Enterprise
| August 27, 2008 |  View for printing |
We all aspire to better standards of living and we depend on growth and productivity to deliver this. Nothing more than enterprise signifies a nation’s confidence and the desire to strive for improvement to better itself.
For the Make Your Mark Campaign, people making their ideas happen is the core essence of enterprise, and creating enterprising places, spaces and mindsets is at the heart of that challenge. When it comes to making economies more dynamic and innovative, Edmund Phelps, the renowned economist and winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics, finds it surprising that so much time is spent on economic institutions when attitudes towards risk-taking, responsibility and team-working actually do a significantly better job at explaining performance differences between countries than institutional factors.
From another part of the world, Dr Abdul Kalam, the renowned scientist, former President of India and not a stranger to hardship and dreaming big, proclaimed that his single mission was to meet and ‘ignite’ at least 100,000 students to shape a new India. Each generation defines enterprise according to its own needs and priorities. Indeed, contrary to popular perceptions, our notion of entrepreneurs and their role in society has not been static over the decades but continues to evolve. In reinventing a Britain that is fit for the twenty-first century we need to reassess the challenges we face and pursue a constant drive to find new ideas and new ways of stimulating enterprise to meet today’s needs, challenges and opportunities.
So as we look ahead to helping to deliver the ambitions of the recently published Enterprise Strategy is the challenge we face simply about encouraging more enterprise or is it also about creating a different kind of enterprise? What is the future face of enterprise? For some this is simply about the economy. Yet for others, like Professor Raymond Kao, author of Entrepreneurism: A philosophy and a sensible alternative for the market economy, enterprise should not be viewed just as a means for wealth creation, but also as something that can contribute to the common good. This collection of essays aims to inform the debate about the future face of enterprise. It contains a wide range of opinions by renowned authors with expertise in their field, entrepreneurs, educationalists and business leaders. It does not attempt to predict the future. Neither is it a comprehensive stocktaking of enterprise culture, for trying to cover the broad agenda of enterprise in a single publication would be impossible. It serves to illuminate possibilities and perspectives on shaping the future of an enterprising UK.
It is also timely, as enterprise and innovation is placed at the heart of a range of new developments in education, business support and economic regeneration. We are grateful to all those who have contributed their ideas and to Demos in helping to pull together such diverse topics and views. Building an enterprise culture depends on exploiting new possibilities and there are hundreds of things that have to change – from what’s in our text books to how society incentivises risk-taking. If you have insights or ideas about the future face of enterprise, please do take the opportunity to contribute through the campaign website – http://www.makeyourmark.org.uk/policy. I hope that the ideas emerging from this series of essays will encourage, inform and challenge you to consider how to bring to life a face of enterprise that is fit for the future.
Raj Patel, is Director of Policy, Make Your Mark campaign. Make Your Mark is the national campaign to unlock the UK’s enterprise potential. The campaign, run by Enterprise Insight, was founded by the British Chambers of Commerce, the CBI, the Federation of Small Businesses and the Institute of Directors. It is supported by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform.
Edited by Shawnee Keck and Alessandra Buonfino
Full Study: http://www.demos.co.uk/files/Demos_F ... ise_web.pdf
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