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Elsie is Born…

June 2, 2011 by admin

I seem to have been a bit quiet on this blog, while I have been doing other things, including pushing Progress School along, working on Collaborate Leeds and incubating a new idea which has finally found the light of day today:

The Leeds Community Enterprise Accelerator or Elsie for short.  This provides a community based network of support to local enterprise coaches, advisors, facilitators, in fact to anyone who is helping someone else in the community to make progress.

I have high hopes for Elsie in post Business Link austerity economy.  I think it will provide a sustainable high value model to provide practical crowd sourced enterprise support to those that most want and need it.

Have a look at Elsie and tell me what you think.

Filed Under: enterprise, entrepreneurship Tagged With: community, community development, community engagement, enterprise coaching, enterprise journeys, entrepreneurship, introductions, local, management, marketing, operations, outreach, policy, professional development, social capital, strategy, training

How to Destroy an Enterprise Culture

September 30, 2010 by admin

This is the title of a workshop I am submitting to the International Conference on Enterprise Promotion, taking place in Harrogate next month.  Don’t know yet if it will be accepted as it bends the ‘submission guidelines’ a little.

Workshop Aims

  • To illustrate how and why most contemporary interventions designed to promote enterprise usually have precisely the opposite effect;
  • To demonstrate how narrow conceptions of enterprise serve to undermine the value of enterprise development for both funders and citizens and sells our profession short;
  • To outline ‘in which direction progress lies’ if we really want to develop more enterprising behaviours in the community;
Conclusions
  • We (policy makers, professionals and community leaders) need to re-conceive what we mean by ‘enterprise’ and ‘enterprise development’ and understand more fully its relationship to ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘business development’ and ‘community’.
  • We need to adopt much more ambivalent approaches to ‘entrepreneurship’, of all kinds, if we really wish to engage ‘community’.
  • We need to take seriously the principles of person centred development in our work to teach people how to live a ‘becoming existence’ and pay serious attention to a credo that says above all ‘Do No Harm’.

Sounds interesting?  See you in Harrogate.  Or get in touch.

Filed Under: enterprise, entrepreneurship Tagged With: community, community development, community engagement, enterprise, enterprise education, entrepreneurship, operations, outreach, professional development, strategy

Innovation and Enterprise….

August 16, 2010 by admin

Recently I have been reflecting with Imran Ali about the nature of innovation in the city (of Leeds in this case) and how it might be developed.  The assumption being that more and better innovation will be an unalloyed good in a fast changing, dynamic, complex yet very finite environment.

Most of the discussion has focussed on some obvious innovation levers that we believe could yield some relatively quick and easy wins, such as:

  • encouraging more innovation across traditional boundaries of department or role
  • seeking applications of technology for social innovation
  • thinking as idealists rather than realists – exploring the art of the possible not just the pragmatic
  • providing ‘investment ready’ development programmes
  • engaging non traditional sources of funding in the innovation process and so on.

But the implicit assumption all of these approaches to innovation is of an innovative elite.  A creative class with the brains, the money (or access to it) and the networks to figure out how to make things significantly better for the rest of us.  Scientists, technologists, financiers, policy makers, politicians, environmentalists, campaigners, entrepreneurs (social and not so social) and academics are all encouraged, incentivised and trained to ‘unleash’ their creativity and innovation.

But how many in the city form part of that elite?  The hallowed few from whom progress is expected to emanate or who feel it is their duty to change the workings of the world. A few thousand perhaps in a city of 800 000.  I suspect it is less than 1% of those living in the city.

I believe that innovation, creativity and change in pursuit of progress, are essential human qualities that will find means of expression.  Regardless.

  • How does the potential of ‘innovation’ play out for the rest?
  • How do the processes of creativity and change in search of progress manifest for them?

Well, I suspect there is another slug of the population who are deeply engaged in creativity and change in relation to developing their  practice, in the more or less explicit hope, that they may be able to join the elite.  Training, learning, networking and thinking of ways to get their hands on the innovation levers.  Would-be entrepreneurs, politicians, students, scientists and bureaucrats who are working their way upwards and onwards.  Some, of course will join the elite. But most, by definition, will not.  And they will join another group of potential innovators.

These are the ones who do not wish to change the world/city/community.  Perhaps they have given up on the challenge. Perhaps they never engaged with it.  But the essential creative drive remains and will be expressed.  It may play out through personal lifestyle choices.  Living the environmental life perhaps, gardening,  reducing the golf handicap, pursuing cultural enlightenment, renovating houses/cars etc.  Progress is defined in more or less personal terms.  It is perhaps the pursuit of happiness rather social change.   Work becomes a job rather than a way to make a mark on the world.  Creative courage is reserved primarily for ‘out of hours’ activities.

And then there is another group who never really established a foothold in ‘the system’.  Those for whom a steady salary providing some level of ‘disposable’ income was never really ‘on the cards’.  Vocational and professional routes for creative expression never opened up for them.   From this group I suspect the systems demands not innovation and creativity but just passive compliance.  Do as your told, smarten up tour appearance, brush up your CV and look for a job.  Or at least pretend you are looking for a job.  But the drive to innovation will out.  Creativity will be expressed.

So when we are looking to support innovation in the city where is the great untapped potential?

  • Does it lie in providing more and better support and training to the elite?
  • Or should we try to mobilise middle England, Big Society style, to rally tot he cause?
  • Or should we perhaps change the terms of engagement with those at the margins of the system?  To shift from a coercive approach to a coaching one?

Anyone for ‘Innovation Coaches’ in Leeds?

Filed Under: enterprise Tagged With: barriers to enterprise, community, community development, community engagement, enterprise coaching, entrepreneurship, operations, outreach, transformation

Big Society Business Support in Leeds

June 20, 2010 by admin

On Friday afternoon @culturevultures convened one of the best business support/development sessions I have witnessed in the last 30 years.

Some 30 creatives came together in a room donated by a local managed workspace to provide peer to peer support on a range of topics related to marketing, branding, writing and social media.  Lots of expertise in the room, lots of desire to explore and learn.  No-one labelled as an adviser – no-one labelled as a client.  Just lots of people willing to share what they knew and ask for help with what they didn’t.

No public funding at all.  Just people donating whatever they thought it was worth.  Donations were used to help pay for cupcakes and cocktails and an afternoon of fun.

Business development as it should be.

This is what the public sector could be paying for.

Filed Under: enterprise, entrepreneurship Tagged With: enterprise, entrepreneurship, outreach, professional development, social marketing, social media, twitter

Scroobius Pip on Young Enterprise

March 20, 2010 by admin

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEitrZU-nCw]

Now here IS an enterprise ambassador!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: barriers to enterprise, community development, community engagement, enterprise, enterprise education, inspiration, outreach, professional development, psychology, training

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