Technological advancements are rapidly transforming the job market, necessitating fresh approaches to prepare the next generation for future opportunities. Enterprise education can sit at the heart of ensuring young people have the skills necessary to flourish.
In Empowering the Future, written in partnership with Youth Business International, Philip Salter highlights some of the key policies we think are required to achieve this.
Despite changing consumer and working patterns, access to different ‘spaces’ are vital to entrepreneurs’ growth ambitions – whether they’re in retail, manufacturing, or are services-based.
In the fifth instalment of our Access All Areas series with Enterprise Nation, we look at what the Government can do to ensure small businesses have the types of spaces they need to sell and scale – from business rates reform to planning policy.
Attitudes towards entrepreneurship have shifted. Increasingly, young people see entrepreneurship as a way of changing the world instead of simply a way of making money. In Tomorrow’s Entrepreneurs, we surveyed young founders – finding, among other things, that the more money a business turns over, the more likely they are to agree that their primary aim was to tackle a social or environmental problem.
The report, published in partnership with Youth Business International, concludes with a series of recommendations on how to better support young entrepreneurs, including broader use of Challenge Prizes and Advanced Market Commitments for innovative solutions to big problems, and bringing back the Enterprise Allowance Scheme to help young entrepreneurs start their own businesses.
The space sector has changed enormously over the last few years – increasing in importance globally for economic growth, for security, and for international partnership. As we look forward, ever more of the major challenges we face as a planet will have solutions, or parts of solutions, from space.
In Space Startups and Scaleups, a number of recommendations are made which aim to capture the opportunities on offer, and ensure British entrepreneurs in the space sector can continue to punch above their weight.
Tech startups have been the British economic success story of the past decade. The tech community, just a footnote a decade ago, is now the heart of the UK’s economy. But now there are storm clouds on the horizon. For the startups, there’s a funding crisis – with valuations cut, hiring freezes imposed, and investment drying up. For the UK as a whole, there’s a macroeconomic crisis, a cost of living crisis, and an uncertain growth path for years to come.
In Tech Startup Manifesto 2022, written in partnership with The Coalition for a Digital Economy (Coadec), we explore how the new Prime Minister can navigate those storm clouds. By ensuring Britain’s tech businesses have access to the capital and people they need, and a regulatory landscape conducive to innovation, the tech sector can continue to shine in the UK.
To thrive in the modern world, Britain’s next generation must be adaptable to change. Up until relatively recently, a job for life was both possible and preferable. It’s increasingly neither. Universities have been central to many of the great intellectual revolutions across history – now they must embrace enterprise education to imbue students with the necessary enterprising skills to flourish in the twenty-first century.
Government has a role to play. Political action — or inaction — has significant repercussions for how enterprise education is delivered. This report aims to inform the government about the successes, challenges and opportunities for delivering enterprise education at universities. Its recommendations are based on responses to a Call for Evidence and aim to work with the grain of the latest thinking and practice.
In recent decades, governments worldwide have employed an array of different policy tools to try to increase start-up rates in their countries, but relatively little attention has been paid to how to support ‘business stay-up’. In that it is among the fastest growing small businesses that employment growth, innovation and productivity gains are strongest, this lag in the progress of entrepreneurship policy should give us cause for concern.
Of those approaches to supporting business sustainability that have been tried, efforts to improve management practices have shown promise. This report adds to a growing body of evidence in this area, new research supporting the importance of human capital to entrepreneurial outcomes.
Author Gabriel Heller Sahlgren’s research substantiates a relationship between business owners’ specific areas of qualification and the growth of their enterprise. Moreover, and more importantly, he further finds that not all areas of qualification are equal in terms of stimulating success. The training obtained through programmes in business, social science, and law, and in technical areas, such as engineering, appear to lead to employee growth – whereas programmes relating to other subject areas do not.
Accordingly the author argues that governments should seek ways to incentivise training in high impact areas, and in management skills specifically. The most promising approaches, he finds, appear to focus on task-related training, in both an operational and specific sense. To maximise the probability of firm success, owners must therefore learn the operational skills of organisation and management, while at the same time keep up-to-date with the latest developments in the field in which they operate.
It is vital that, as Britain leaves the European Union, we are one of the best places in the world to start and grow a business. Getting tax policy right is key to creating a business environment that fosters entrepreneurship. Tax reform can deliver faster economic growth, boost employment and raise wages.
Developed countries face a long-term decline in entrepreneurship that is at least partially driven by demographics. Since demographic trends cannot be easily reversed, countries will have to improve the environment in which entrepreneurs and businesses operate, to encourage more and better entrepreneurs.
This series of essays are published in partnership with Canada’s Fraser Institute, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in the US and the Institute of Public Affairs in Australia.
This is the fourth Parliamentary Snapshot. It uncovers MPs’ views on policies impacting entrepreneurs, providing unique insights on the opinions and working knowledge of the House of Commons. Once again, this report is supported by Bircham Dyson Bell (BDB).
Key finding include:
66% of Conservative MPs think “leaving the EU through a hard Brexit” would be good for entrepreneurship, only 8% of Labour MPs think the same.
71% of Labour MPs think “remaining within the EU” would be positive for entrepreneurship in the UK, only 10% of Conservative MPs think the same.
Greatest divergence in four years of this survey between the two main parties on lowering personal taxes, with 91% of Conservative MPs thinking it would be good for entrepreneurship, compared to just 26% of Labour MPs.
Over four years of the survey, Parliament has shown growing cross-party support for a more liberal immigration policy for British businesses. “Making it easier for entrepreneurs to move to the UK” is the second most popular change for MPs (79% of MPs are positive and 4% just negative), and we have seen increasing support from both parties for “making it easier to hire skilled workers from abroad” (62% of MPs are positive and 14% negative).
Although MPs’ knowledge about initiatives to support entrepreneurs have risen against previous years, too many initiatives remain unknown. 54% of the MPs have never even heard of Venture Capital Trusts or don’t know enough about it to know whether it’s effective.
Sixty-six entrepreneurs and experts have put their name to a letter calling on the next Government to put together a coherent plan to boost Britain’s businesses.
The letter supports this detailed policy report, which includes contributions from the Institute of Directors, Federation of Small Businesses, Nesta, Adam Smith Institute, Sage, IPSE, SQW, Coadec and Nesta.
The policy asks are at the vanguard of research in the UK; don’t rely on the vagaries of Brexit negotiations; could be adopted by all political parties; and wouldn’t put a significant strain on the exchequer. The project is sponsored by Sage.
In these pithy articles, the solutions to some of London’s biggest challenges are detailed and faced head-on by experts with the aim of ensuring Britain's capital continues to flourish.
Once again, this Snapshot uncovers MPs' views on policies impacting entrepreneurs as well as providing useful insights on the opinions and working knowledge of the House of Commons. This report was supported by BDB.
This briefing paper is based on the edited highlights of a roundtable discussion. It took place at the Leeds office of PwC with business leaders invested in promoting Yorkshire as a hub for entrepreneurship. Our principal guest was Iain Wright MP, chair of the Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Select Committee. The ideas presented were designed to feed into his work on the committee, the Northern Powerhouse initiative and wider debates on how to support entrepreneurship across the whole of the country.
Parliamentary Snapshot 2015 follows up on the previous year's report, uncovering areas where MPs' views have changed towards how best to support entrepreneurship in the UK. This report was supported by BDB.
Based on a ground-breaking survey of 1,599 graduate international students, this report reveals that the visa system is failing international graduate entrepreneurs who want to start a business in the UK.
This is the first survey to uncover the views of MPs on policies impacting entrepreneurs, providing useful insights on the opinions and working knowledge of the House of Commons.
An Entrepreneurs’ Manifesto is a selection of seventeen ideas that the authors think would help support and promote high growth businesses in Britain.
