This year was my first trip to Venturefest Yorkshire. This is an enormous annual gathering of entrepreneurs, inventors and investors all looking to build the management and financial teams that they need for business success. Both private and public sector were well represented.
It was free to attend and extremely busy!
A whole floor of the main grandstand was given over to ‘enterprising schools’. When I visited the busiest stand by a long way was the ‘Robot Wars’ competition where a broad definition of enterprise was in evidence. Lots of young people engaged in building robots and competing against each other as well as collaborating to ensure that everyone had the equipment, time and space that they needed to keep things on the road.
Nothing was being bought or sold but enterprise and enterprise skills abounded.
Some of the quieter stalls had taken a much narrower definition of enterprise. They made stuff (badges, t-shirts and fruit kebabs) and tried to sell them! I hope that the young people on these stalls learnt a lot from their efforts. They appeared to be having relatively little fun (compared to the Robot Warriors) and found selling in an exhibition environment to be extremely hard work.
I only hope that they were not put off the idea of enterprise.