Enterprise education isn't just about getting people to start businesses. We focus most of our attentions on preparing students for a fast changing global economy by equipping them with a range of skills and habits of behaviour inspired by the actions of successful entrepreneurs.
In recent years the consensus in higher education has been that this approach works and that developing more enterprising staff and graduates should be part of every university's strategic mission. In the pre-credit crunch economy, enterprise education was heavily subsidised by public funds with almost 80% of all extracurricular activity reliant on this source. The challenge in the new era is how to create valuable experiences with fewer resources.
The Inspiring Enterprise conference at Glyndŵr University, organised by the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning is one example of a new wave of events which has best practice implications for the sector as a whole.
A boutique regional conference with a tight remit, it has a tiny budget and normally attracts only around 50 people. Given the broad interest in the topics to be discussed during the two days, the organisers decided to use social media, presentation sharing, liveblogging, and a video channel to disseminate its findings to an audience of over 200 virtual participants who could make contributions without being present. This provided an opportunity to reach an international audience, stimulating wider conversations, while highlighting a potential future for smaller academic conferences and symposia.
Operation Husky is a different kind of event but with the same philosophy – that being small and intensive can generate great results. In 2010 the Institute of Applied Entrepreneurship at Coventry University set out to address the need for higher education institutions to provide support services more aligned with the world of the entrepreneur, where time pressures are one of the key factors inhibiting business development activity. With that in mind the organisers set out to embed best practice from industry and academic support activities to develop a new business development experience, resulting in an immersive 24-hour business acceleration event for student entrepreneurs.
With a guest speaker every four hours volunteering to provide support and resources donated by local firms, the event aims to construct an intense environment for the participants, where those with a business idea join with those who have a newly trading enterprise.
Upon completion of the event, 100% of participants indicated that they had found the event beneficial to their business development. All students felt that the event provided better results than other similar events they had attended; some of them making weeks' worth of progress and development in just 24 hours. The event also drew on social and web-based technologies to draw on the experience of a wider community and disseminate ideas created inside the "bubble".
We are not saying that we are the only people doing these things – there are other universities offering a range of enterprise-based events and activities – but some of them are working with a model that is unsustainable given the new economic conditions.
If the rest of higher education is going to learn one thing from our experiences we would hope that it is the need to bootstrap more events and create amazing experiences by leveraging new models and new tools, and along the way work on building a community who will help, support and make all of these activities possible as long as you provide them with great content in return.
Matthew Draycott is the enterprise associate at Glyndŵr University and Tom Williamson is a lecturer at the Institute of Applied Entrepreneurship, Coventry University. Both tweet at @draycottmc and @floppyarms respectively
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