How universities can sow the seeds of an enterprise culture
AS WE all know, entrepreneurs and innovators create jobs, are the source of innovation and new ideas, provide the impetus for the growth of new sectors, increase competition within the market and, through ensuring opportunities in deprived regions, help reduce social exclusion.
And as this column has pointed out time and time again over the past 16 years, helping entrepreneurs start, grow and renew their businesses is one of the most important things any local, regional or national government can do to help create jobs and raise living standards.
With recent statistics suggesting that the number of those starting a new business is falling across most local authority areas in Wales, there should be a greater imperative for policy-makers to do more to support those entrepreneurs who are the real job-creators in the economy.
However, to encourage a greater enterprise culture in society, we need to develop the entrepreneurs and innovators of the future at a vital time for the Welsh economy. In particular, there are many reasons why universities should play a more active role in the promotion of a stronger enterprise culture and in the stimulation of entrepreneurship across the Welsh economy.
These include fostering greater levels of enterprise in young people and responding to the potential for all graduates from every discipline to become successful entrepreneurs in their own enterprises.
It also means preparing university graduates for employment within the majority employer in today’s economy, namely the small to medium enterprises (SME) sector, and contributing to the capacity of SMEs to survive, develop and grow, and thus make a real contribution to the local and regional economy.
More importantly, there is now a general acceptance that entrepreneurs are made, not born, and that entrepreneurial skills can be developed.
Greater attention is being given to the benefits, both economic and social, of encouraging greater levels of enterprise in young people and a capacity for lifelong learning attitudes and behaviours.
Not only is the development of new enterprises being encouraged, there is also a growing need for young people to possess greater levels of enterprise, creativity, initiative, self-reliance, flexibility and the capacity for self-management.
These qualities and behaviours enable them to manage in a workforce increasingly characterised by change, uncertainty and a decreasing pool of permanent employment positions.
There is also a need to address a perception held by some that many university students lack what may be termed “self-management skills” – considered vital not only for selfemployment, but also for career and life planning and management generally.
So how can this be done within the university sector in Wales?
First of all, there is a need for education that stimulates enterprise for all students and across the entire university curriculum by focusing on enterprising attitudes, skills and behaviours.
Education that stimulates enterprise does so through an emphasis on the kind of teaching and learning that promotes self-directed and experiential learning. Indeed, there is no reason why every single student in all of Wales’ eight universities should not be given at least one lecture that tells them about the amazing ways in which entrepreneurship can change lives.
Then for those who then wish to study the subject in more detail, a more formal approach can be taken wherein students study a curriculum that contains topics or subjects on entrepreneurship, innovation and small business management.
Bur perhaps most important of all is education through enterprise, which focuses on students learning through experiences, typically with small businesses in either actual (ie work placements) or simulated entrepreneurial activities.
The question is how many universities in Wales are fully integrating such developments into their curricula to ensure that the entrepreneurial potential of our graduate population is being fully utilised for the challenges of today’s knowledge economy.
The need to foster potential successful entrepreneurs from a university’s student population comes from evidence that graduates have the abilities and skills increasingly needed in those high-technology and knowledge-based businesses that are at the core of all of the City Growth Deals across the Welsh economy.
And while many higher education institutions across the UK would like to claim the moniker of “entrepreneurial university”, very few are actually practising what they are preaching.
Given this, one can only hope that Welsh universities will take this agenda more seriously and thus grasp the opportunity to make a significant impact on their local and regional economies at a time when it is most needed.