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More enterprising communities are stronger, wealthier, happier and sustainable.
Aren’t they?
The advantages are obvious.
So how come, when we’ve explained the benefits of enterprise so carefully, and offered all the help and support any budding entrepreneur could possibly need, we’re still not mowed down in the rush as enthused and energised communities respond to the call?
DCLG has sparked a renewed interest in enterprise in deprived communities with its investment in Local Enterprise Growth Initiative. The focus on enterprise is in danger of being overwhelmed by the much larger and wider investments going into the worklessness agenda (with more of a focus on routes into employment rather than creating your own work). It must be quite strange from the residents point of view. One week someone from the ‘Government’ is urging them to get ‘a great business idea’ or ‘start a social enterprise’ and the next week someone else is telling them to ‘brush up their CV’, ‘join a job club’ and ‘seek work’. I suppose we should not be surprised that these appear to be competing initiatives at the neighbourhood level – fighting to engage the same people in their respective ‘customer journeys’. But I would like to think that more could be done to help individual residents to see these as two possible options on their journey.
I think it is interesting to meet the range of service providers involved in the local enterprise work. Some come from a very ‘public service/third sector’ orientation while others have a much more ‘follow the money’ mentality looking to deliver the outputs (often very poorly specified) at lowest cost. This latter group usually have more experience of the way that public money is spent and understand that at some point they will be held to account for what they done. From day one they count and record what they think will interest the funders. The worrying thing for me is that both sides of this divide need a little bit of what the other side has to offer. Both risk failure for different reasons.
It is also clear to me the LEGI investments are not an end in themselves but rather provide an opportunity to play a part in a much monger term, potentially lucrative and worthwhile game. The cities and regions that can show that they can take public sector funding and provide a return on that investment in terms of reduced benefit budgets, improved health and psychological well being, reductions in crime and grime, increased tax takes and NI contributions and a whole range of other social and economic benefits will surely position themselves well for future investment.
Those that deliver a range of occasionally interesting, but ultimately unproven projects, are unlikely to see further funding once the LEGI money runs out. My worry is that some do not seem to be aware of the possibility of this larger game and are happy to settle for the effective project management of what they already have resigned to the fact that it will all be wound up in a few short years when the money has all been spent.
So the challenge is to create significant value from the current investments and to demonstrate that value in hard cash terms to funders.
So David Cameron wants to double the number of Health Visitors. Those tackling the worklessness agenda want to use caseworkers to get people off of benefits and back into work. On the Enterprise agenda we have community motivators, enterprise champions, enablers and streetwalkers – all working in communities to encourage individuals to consider self-employment and starting a business.
Two problems:
Perhaps what is required is a much more client centred (rather than policy led) engagement on the (distinct lack of) demand side – helping individuals to decide for themselves what might constitute progress for them (rather than for the policy makers) – and then helping them to access service providers that can help. Community workers who are not looking to sell policy objectives but just to respond effectively and with commitment to individuals who want to try to make things better for themselves and their families. Workers who are trained to leave people alone unless they ask to be helped. Outreach workers with nothing to sell – just the skills to help and extensive networks into the expertise and infrastructure that has already been developed on the supply side.
This would be a very different model of engagement and one that might just work.
The case workers might just start to help people move forward on agendas that matter to them. To become more enterprising in improving their own circumstances and ability. To start again exploring and developing their own potential
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One of the things that bugs me (especially when I catch myself doing it) is when we use enterprise and entrepreneurship as if they were almost the same thing.
For me, ‘enterprise’ describes a set of behaviours that are defined at the level of the individual. For example, if Richard Branson were to set up another major record label and make a few quid – by his standards that would not be very enterprising. Stuff he has done before – to great success – so where’s the enterprise? However for him to get into space travel, railways, ballooning, cosmetics etc is enterprising because they are new challenges.
So enterprise is a relative concept defined by the individual and where they are starting from. If we want to encourage more ‘enterprise’ especially in areas of deprivation with few enterprising role models we have to be prepared to accept wider definitions of enterprise. We have to acknowledge the concept of introducing people to an enterprise journey that may take years to get close to ‘starting a business’ or that may head in a completely different direction.
So a young person in South Leeds who attends a training course to qualify as a referee is ‘enterprising’. The provision of the referee training course has encouraged enterprise. If we are canny, once we have engaged that individual in their enterprising journey we can then help them to plot the next steps – to help keep them moving forward. Enterprising people are making positive things happen.
By defining enterprise too narrowly as ‘starting a business’ or ‘becoming self employed’ we are often encouraging people to start their enterprise journey at a point that is already a very long way down the tracks. This significantly increases the chances of failure and loss of engagement.
To avoid this trap we need to be very careful in the way we specify, commission, deliver and evaluate the impact of ‘enterprise growth’ projects.
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.