Entrepreneurship – Dynamite Comes in Small Packages – The Future Face of Enterprise

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_FutureFaceEnterprise_web.pdf