Making Innovation Flourish

Can you teach enterprise?

In the latest essay from our series on ‘Preparing for the Future’, Claire O’Halloran from Microsoft poses the question: “Can you teach enterprise?” Professor Dylan Jones-Evans, Director of the National Entrepreneurship Observatory for Wales argues that “you can’t teach it, but you can learn it.”

What you do think?

Claire goes on to argue that developing entreprenuerial skills requires people to be open to learning and to try to think “more like an entrepreneur”. She believes that, in many cases, this is about giving people confidence.

But how do we learn these skills and gain this confidence?

Preparing for the Future: A Generation of Mentees

Luke Skywalker knew how to be a good mentee and as a result, the whole universe was at his fingertips…..

In the second of our series on preparing young people for a rapidly changing world, entrepreneur Tom Hadfield highlights the importance of mentoring.

Tom argues that “the art of how to ask for advice from mentors, how to distil the key lessons and how to apply them to our own lives is one of the best kept secrets in education”.

This is a refreshingly novel idea. Effective mentoring benefits all parties involved. For the mentor, it provides a personal development opportunity. For young people, it encourages them to seek advice and guidance, and, as Richard Reeves argues in last week’s essay, to continually question. A successful mentoring relationship can provide young people with some of the skills likely to be needed to succeed in the future workplace, such as confidence, enquiry skills, reflection and flexibility.

Is the current education system the right environment for successful mentoring relationships to develop? Much support is given to training the mentor. But how do we support young people to ask the right questions in a environment which focuses on knowing the right answers? As always, I am keen to hear your views.

The most important question an entrepreneur has to answer

Sherry Coutu (in her article in the 'what I wish I'd known'  series) explains that “solving someone’s problem” is at the heart of a business.

On the face of it, it appears an obvious consideration, however, a large proportion of the companies we see can not satisfactory articulate the problem they are solving. I put it down to a reluctance of some early stage entrepreneurs to really get to know their potential customers early on in a business’s life. This hesitancy to speak to a real customer can lead to outrageous assumptions on the depth of the so called ‘problem’ that they are solving.

Answering the question ‘what problem are you solving’ is fundamental to getting to the heart of the value of your business…if that is not enough reason to reconsider this concept then consider that every sensible investor I know asks a version of this question at some point in their first meeting with a company that is looking for investment. In short it is essential that you and everyone in your business can give a clear, articulate answer.

Ideo, Interdisciplinarity and Enterprise

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Enterprise 2.0 at NESTA

On Friday we took another step toward Enterprise 2.0 with the launch of our new structured wiki Intranet. I think the structured wiki approach is a great way of introducing organisations to the concepts of the social web - in theory, providing the best of both worlds: the empowerment and collaborative elements of wikis, with the order and familiarity of traditional content-managed systems. In my mind, this caters for both types of users: the freeform searchers & the more traditional navigators. It reduces the fear of chaos, while still providing a great deal of the flexibility and tools common in other 'social web' environments. We're yet to prove the theory, but I do think the product we've chosen (ThoughtFarmer) has a lot of potential to bring real positive change to our ways of working. Even if we only reduce the overuse of email, it'll be a great start.

Corporation tax

Northern Ireland's proposal to the Treasury that it should have the ability to reduce corporation tax is an audacious move.  If awarded (or even considered seriously) it begins a new phase in the development of regional innovation strategies, and one that may not be healthy.