Distilled Ginger Wisdom

Over the course of November I’m freelancing at Bath Spa University running a series of events on enterprising career paths.

Bath Spa University has a vested interest in supporting enterprising students for several key reasons:

They have a higher than average number of students in self-employment 6 months after graduation (12-14% compared to nationally 5-6% according to DLHE data), this is linked to...

Like a lot of Arts Schools they have a lot of degree programmes that lead up to the creative industries as a sector, which is increasingly ‘precarious’ and dominated by contracting, portfolio working, and freelancers.

Student interest in entrepreneurship of all forms continues to swell year on year with more seeing it as a viable career pathway.

So this autumn we have a 3-part series on different strands of enterprising careers, starting with Freelancing. The essential structure is one or more workshops led by experts plus good Q&A opportunities for the students to engage and network. The events are supplemented by great resources on the BathSparks web-page (locked inside the Bath Spa intranet - sorry!) and further prompts and tools shared via social media.

For this event I enlisted a couple of real experts in starting out and managing a freelance career: Philiy Page of Creative Women International and Helen Forsyth of Find a Creative Pro whose shared insights and advice I’ve tried to summarise below:

Be a Brand.

As an emerging freelancer its difficult to stand out and establish credibility - you may have little professional work to shout about. You need to think like a brand and establish yourself as a leader in your field - can you establish credibility and leadership by developing and recording personal projects, volunteering your services to charities, critiquing others, writing reviews, or curating good content?

The Banana Test.

You will need to hone how you pitch what it is you do - and the value that you can provide for a client. Can you articulate your pitch written on a banana? If it doesn’t fit it is too long!

Mastermind Groups.

It really helps at the early stages to have some peer support, can you gather some people going through the same process as you to kick ideas around with you and share experiences?

Six Degrees of Separation.

Supposedly we’re all connected by just six connections (according to LinkedIn I know someone who knows someone who does in fact know Kevin Bacon) - make the most of your own networks and those of your friends to identify dream clients.

Brief well

Managing expectations is critical for freelance work - do you and your client actually understand the outcomes and process that you’ve agreed to? Is there any chance of misunderstanding and confusion? Be clear about outcomes, timelines, costs, processes, and communications.

Get a contract EVERY time.

Contracts set down those expectations and clarify agreements in case of future dispute. Whilst it might feel extreme even a simple contract can make a world of difference, and its professional! Even casual work for friends should be bound by contract, just in case.

Communicate professionally.

A couple of months back I found this Forbes article on the impacts of innovation on Higher Education.

Given I now teach in a Centre for Innovation it looked like the kind of thing I should be reading - it's not about teaching innovation, it's about how innovations in and around HE are impacting on our model of what HE is, what it does, and how our 'consumers' engage with us. Whilst I personally find much of the 'consumerisation' of HE dispiriting and soul-destroying I can easily recognise the impacts of the trends towards individualisation, return on investment, and commodification outlined in the discussion framed by the article.

One particular idea struck me powerfully - this 'unbundling' of the degree model; at the moment students still 'buy' a 'package' from a university that includes both tutelage, certification, and access to a huge array of support services (accommodation, IT, study support, welfare, careers advice, extra-curricular activity etc) most of which is still 'bundled' into the course fee. However the future model might separate these elements out; a student might assemble their degree from units or modules taken at a dozen or more institutions via remote means, like buying single tracks rather than an album. They might not 'need' many of the packaged extras, or they may decide they don't need to pay for them... why pay for welfare services or study support if you're not studying 'at' a specific institution?

This kind of opportunity would apparently suit many young people; a lower-cost, more bespoke, more flexible, less structured model that means you could study almost any course from anywhere in the world. It would render a lot of the infrastructure (and jobs) that universities have amassed for years unnecessary and unaffordable if it became the standard model for degree study - so this represents a huge challenge for universities and one that they will resist.

However unless every HE institution resists, and unless the private sector is forcibly kept out, then this model will emerge as students vote with their feet. In the current situation in the UK you can easily foresee that private organisations will move into the HE market with a niche offer of specialist online or blended learning offers and start picking up students via a 'pick and mix' model of programmes. HE is a market ripe for disruption because of the scale of vested interests in a model that is largely unchanged for decades if not centuries. Institutions with prestigious names and reputations may well be able to mop up online students to supplement their income from traditional students and 'lesser' institutions will fade or downsize and further compound their financial models as students elect for flexible alternatives.

To quote the article's opening paragraph: "What does it really mean to be “educated”? And what is the role of institutions of higher education? Are our universities institutions of vocational training, funded to prepare students for jobs? Or are they institutions whose purpose is something a bit higher than that, perhaps loftier? Or both? Or neither?"

All this talk of an unbundled experience suggests to me that Universities and the school system that feeds them need to articulate a stronger argument and more explicitly framed about a 'bundled' approach to Higher Education - the whole student experience, not just the course. It should serve as a compelling case for the importance of extra-curricular activities and a participatory experience - not just a consumerist approach to academic content. Universities have to turn that amassed infrastructure from being an expensive millstone into an unassailable advantage that entrants to the market cannot compete with.

However, the challenge of price remains; just because the 'going away to university' for the 'bundled' experience might be more developmental doesn't make it affordable. We should all be worried that HE might again become a bastion of privilege for those who can afford it. If HE is reduced to a purely 'return on investment' model for students, how do we encourage them to value the whole of the experience and not just the degree certificate itself? We already know that employers want a more rounded individual to emerge, which has to be about more than just an assembling of curricular credits?

A purely economic argument about the value of Higher Education for either an individual student, or the country as a whole, is missing most of the value of Higher Education: its about developing intelligent, creative, cultured generations of young people who add not just to the financial bottom line of the country, their employers, and their own bank accounts - but add social, cultural, creative, artistic, and scientific value too. Much of that development happens in the holistic experience of Higher Education.

Just before I left my role as Head of Enterprise & Employability at Bath Spa University I sat down with a colleague (Ben Franks, now running his start-up Novel Wines) and tried to segment different student attitudes to our enterprise, entrepreneurship, and freelance support offer. It’s a little crude but it really helped us check that we were covering all of the bases with our attempts to promote our work.

I chatted to a couple of people about this at IEEC who suggested it might be interesting to share - so here’s a link to a googledoc version on which you can leave suggestions should you so wish...

I'm on the train back from this year's International Enterprise Educators Conference (IEEC) as inspired, challenged, and intimidated by the practice of my peers as ever.

One persistent theme this year for me was the continued pursuit of ever more authentic educational delivery, assessment, and contextualisation. One student was absolutely convinced this should start from day one year one and I found this a bit challenging if I'm honest. The student seemed to equate authenticity with industry briefs, client work, and similar - and delivered from the first day of study.

Authenticity is important; it's attractive to students, parents, and employers as a potential head-start for graduate employment, it gives content more credibility and legitimacy, and it creates opportunities for industry to play a role in the educational pathway that might lead someone to their door in the future looking for a job.

But how authentic can we or should we make it? In practice the logistics and (time) costs of simulation and engaging industry can be prohibitive (as setting up degree apprenticeships is proving), and in principle we are still in education... If students actually wanted *authentic* they should have gone straight to the workplace!  

Now direct entry to the workplace might not be an available option (rightly or wrongly), or it might not have been perceived by the student as an option (HE and FE marketing to school-leavers rather squeezes out the 'go direct' route) but equally there must be some value to 'less than authentic' education as some sort of stepping stone BEFORE the actual workplace... As a safe space, as a test, as a general or fundamental grounding in something before indulging in specific practice? 

Some students will seek out this stepping stone, others will see it as the only available route, others will see it as a way to keep their options slightly open whilst they explore.

The question emerging here is 'what constitutes authenticity?' (and the answer may be different for starting student, finishing student, educator and employer). How 'real' does it need to be?

More authentic experiences feel more satisfying and more relevant than classroom learning, but do we have any evidence they're better at preparing students for the world of work (in general)? Does learning on the job accelerate learning or confine it to specific tasks and organisations? Does classroom-based learning help cultivate a broader and more critical approach or waste time that could be spent practising a specific process? I suspect the best option is a mix, the fundamentals leading to the specific and practical, or better still an early authentic experience which helps contextualise and make relevant the fundamentals which are then taught before practical content is returned to.

Does this mean deliberately NOT adding too much authenticity too soon? Or maybe there are specific features within authenticity that can be drip-fed into a programme? You might not let first-year students work to real live client briefs for example, but still use industry examples and have an industry judge for the assessment. You might save complex collaborative projects for later stages after skills and confidence have been built up via simpler but no less collaborative initial projects.

One of my new colleagues at the CFI pointed me to this video by Astro Teller (what an amazing name) from Google/Aphabet’s ‘X’. Well worth watching but here’s my summary of the key ideas.

Teller suggests that every new project development includes both time that is directly productive to achieving the outcome and time spent learning stuff about how to achieve that outcome. For many of the ‘Moonshot’ projects at Google/Alphabet’s ‘X’ the learning can be 90% of the time spent on the project with only 10% of the time directly producing the outcome. He identifies ‘innovation’ as making that 90% as quick and efficient as possible - the ability to “compress” that learning to be quick and cheap is a mark of how innovative an individual or organisation can be.

As a result “fast failure” is encouraged, i.e. not dragging out failing projects but being ruthless at culling them, optimising the learning acquired, and moving onto the next project.

He then identifies a host of reasons why humans don’t like failing and especially not publicly and how they’ve built a culture that encourages learning from fast failure, builds creative confidence, and keeps them innovating.

Rewarding people for killing projects: actively celebrating individuals and teams who end a project and rewarding them with bonuses and holidays for doing so. He really stresses the importance of authentic rewards here - no amount of goodwill and certificates creates cultural norms quite like financial bonuses do.

Using “pre-mortem” meetings at the start of a project to tease out the predicted reasons it will fail - and then working to mitigate or remove those risks.

Acknowledging creative thought-processes (even if the idea itself stinks), it encourages people to take risks and be creative.

All these ideas make sense in the context of creativity and rapid innovation - but as Teller himself acknowledges they’re a little counter-intuitive to most work and study environments where ‘failure’, criticism, and silliness are not rewarded.

This feels particularly challenging in an academic environment where we inevitably try and mark someone for getting it ‘right’, where the ego and professional reputation staked to a specific idea can make it feel like juggling porcelain, and where a slow bureaucratic process makes trial-and-error difficult to use as a development tool.

After 23 months away I find myself back at the University of Bristol, as a Teaching Fellow in the new Centre for Innovation (CfI). I've shifted from the professional side of HE to the academic, moved to a PT contract to accommodate some freelancing, and I'm going to update this blog once more to capture and share my learning.

Its wonderful to be in at the start of something; the CfI is currently a handful of new starters, a largely empty office floor, a name, some course descriptors, and a whole heap of aspiration and bright ideas. The new starters are intimidatingly talented, the space is huge, the ambitions are both worthy and challenging - it's all pretty exciting really! The students start in 3 weeks!

The first challenge is turning a big white box of a space, a disparate bunch of strangers, and some aspirational documents into a living breathing thing that grows and develops innovators. We're building an ecosystem. In my interview for this role I was quick to suggest you can't teach entrepreneurship, but it can be learned, so you have to build an environment that stimulates, supports, challenges, and hones would-be entrepreneurs and innovators. We have to make this space, and the people in it, walk the talk.

The sense of opportunity is palpable here and its both invigorating and terrifying, as all authentic challenges should be.

My particular personal challenges here will be about rekindling ambition and shedding some cynicism. What I mean by this is that after several years on the professional side of HE, dealing with politics and bureaucracy, negotiating the accumulated inertia, I suddenly find myself in open(ish) space with time to think and create - what will I actually do with it all? I'm very used to getting "enough" done, to a "decent" quality, on the sidelines of other duties, now I have an opportunity to pour some time into this work.

Furthermore, I realise I've grown a little cynical about entrepreneurship and innovation; I've learned (after probably too many years) about opportunity cost and have become (slightly) more wary of ideas and less enthused. However, having seen some of our new students' application videos, and the soaring optimism and inspiration on display, I will need to temper the pragmatism and tap back into my own aspiration to not shoot these fledging entrepreneurs down!

(Also appears on the Create-Hub blog)

The music of massed frogs, composing for piano and grinding rocks, and an iPad-based ballet installation, one academic's creative uses of technology might stretch your sense of the possible.  

Professor Andrew Hugill is Director of the Centre for Creative Computing at Bath Spa University, and he has a long record of creative outputs in which digital technologies have played a critical role. Whilst Andrew would be at pains to suggest he does do 'conventional' work for serious commissions his self-initiated projects often seem to start with a 'what if...' type provocation or curiosity-driven query into something the rest of us would regard as difficult or unlikely to produce anything of value.

My first real encounter with Andrew's creative use of technology was featuring his Digital Opera as part of Bath Spa's exhibits at the Bristol and Bath 'VentureFest' at which we showcased how the kinds of creativity the university is famous for are increasingly based on digital technology. However, it was the second encounter, this time with a showcasing of 'Pianolith' at a 'show and tell' meeting for some of our many academic creative practitioners that I really got fascinated. 'Pianolith' is a composition based on the duet of piano and grinding rocks... and essentially seeks to showcase that a skilled pianist can accompany something as seemingly un-musical as scraping stones. For all those of us asking 'why do this?' Andrew's answer was essentially 'why not - it looked interesting?'

Technology has always been an enabling tool, through the advent of new technologies we can unlock new opportunities by rendering the impossible or difficult into the possible and accessible. The development of new technologies and new uses for existing technology tends to be driven by both problem-solving approaches, "how do we solve this?" and more inquisitive approaches, "what happens if we do this?" This latter approach - the 'what if...' approach might feel more speculative but often leads to more creative and unexpected outcomes. Both methods come into play when an individual deliberately tries to do something that no-one else had even contemplated doing... like composing for a pianist to accompany the sound of scraping stones... 

Whilst the benefits were not obvious at the outset of the process Andrew has not only developed a wealth of knowledge about processing unlikely sounds into 'music', but has provoked some major musicians into completely re-evaluating what they are able to 'accompany': "During the recording session for Andrew Hugill’s PIANOLITH I had an extraordinary experience. The music seemed to have its own inner mind which gradually took over the performance. With every take I made, my mind became totally free. This experience moved me greatly and prompted me to seek similar qualities in other music." (Evgenia Chudinovich, aka GéNIA) For me the instructive element was how an apparently unfruitful challenge can unleash creativity without any weight of expectation.

Profiling all of Andrew's work would take a whole series of blogs but in a brief interview Andrew was able to share some insights into his approach to using technology as part of his creative process. Andrew crucially self-identified as an educator first and foremost, with an urge to explain and illustrate, and the research has followed later. Andrew's personal history is littered with examples of being drawn to the difficult, unreadable, esoteric, and under-appreciated - and then trying to make sense of it to others. The challenges seem to stimulate his creativity, or maybe his urge for creative exploration draws him to the challenges...

Technology from the pencil to the computer is critical in Andrew's work, but early experiences of computers (using punch-card machines to produce cricket scores in the 70s) must make him an early digital immigrant and enthusiast. However, Andrew credits the rise of the desktop PC in the 90s as the point at which he fully appreciated the opportunities of computers. The marriage of computing know-how and musical passion is a rich mix for creative opportunities. Andrew highlights the usefulness of the algorithmic programming process as a way to explore creativity - using a flow-diagram of 'if then...' steps through a creative process that a machine could follow. Breaking simple tasks down into steps draws out all the fine detail of a thought process that might then be explored for creative opportunities.

Andrew's final words of advice were not to look at the technology available now - but to try and spot the technology that will be commonplace in five years’ time - neural control, biotechnology... maybe VR will live up to the hype...

As part my work as a volunteer chair for the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services (AGCAS) we’re starting a blog on enterprise and entrepreneurship themes for colleagues working in Careers Services. This is my first contribution.

It's becoming increasingly vital to talk to students about enterprise and entrepreneurship; more and more of them are likely to be self-employed every year, and often in industry sectors where the students heading their way are the least likely to want to talk about commercial success and business planning. I frequently find myself presenting to Artists, Musicians, and Dancers trying to persuade them that entrepreneurship is something they need to think about... Many simply avoid it, others focus in on what they feel they need to know - registering self-employed, but few initially want to tackle the really meaningful questions for success and failure like - "what are you selling?", "who is the customer?", "who or what are you competing against?", "how do you make enough money?" and so on.

However - I have found one tool that has been really useful in unlocking some of these audiences, however hostage-like they may initially feel. The 'Personal Business Model Canvas' (from the book 'Business Model You' by Tim Clark) is developed from a really well used tool called the 'Business Model Canvas' (from the book 'Business Model Generation' by Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur). It's a simple one-page visualisation of how a business model fits together and then adapted for thinking about a specific individual might catalyse their skills and interests to develop a sustainable business.

The various canvasses are largely available under creative commons licensing - just search for them online - although all the books are worthwhile if you get taken with the canvasses.

The beauty of the original Canvas is that you can start your planning from anywhere - by focusing on a specific customer, by harnessing a particular resource or network, by identifying a new customer-attraction or relationship management model, but usually by identifying a valuable new product or service. Once you start filling in the boxes and drawing relationships you can iterate repeatedly until it all fits together.

The Personal Business Model Canvas (PBMC) start with a focus on the individual - who are you, what are you interested in, what are you good at? (Key Resources). Then it draws out what you know how to do - roles played, professional skills, acquired knowledge and competence (Key Activities). From here you can begin to articulate how you might help others - what kinds of value can you create, what problems can you solve, how do you enhance or mitigate the issues other people or organisations face? (Value Proposition). This section is critical - the articulation of value - and I think its valuable to say out loud that its rare that anyone has a particular skill or ability that no-one else has, but the art to success is in finding the combinations of skills and experiences that make you a valuable and useful rarity.

From here we move on to 'who gets helped' (Customers) - who needs you, to do what, are there enough of them to employ you, will they reward you? This is the great naivety check - can the student identify someone who will pay them (enough) for doing the thing they want to do? Or will they need to modify that offering to find enough customers? For more on this also check out 'Value Proposition Design' (also by Osterwalder and Pigneur). Customers are linked to the Value Proposition by Channels ('how do people find out about you?') and Customer Relationships ('how you interact with your customers'). These elements represent marketing, communication, distribution, networking, and retail design (online, in person, or through a third-party broker). By now, most student groups I've presented this to are pretty engaged, starting to ask questions and offer up ideas about how they'll promote this new business of theirs.

Next up in the sequence is 'what you get' (Revenues & Benefits) and 'what you give' (Costs) and its worth spending some time here explaining that its not all about cash. Its about less tangible things like autonomy, lifestyle, work-life balance, energy, reputation and more. You do want to end up in profit - or the business is an unsustainable and expensive hobby - but there are opportunities here to think about how to make your business offer more valuable and also ways in which you can reduce costs and thus increase your profits that way. I also make a point of illustrating that if you're passionate about a business then its less 'costly' to you than doing something you hate. That's why the PBMC starts with who you are - because your interests help identify business ideas that are emotionally 'cheaper' for you to run. Likewise if you're a shy type then a business that involves a lot of networking is going to be comparatively costly...

The final element is a great way to address many of the costs - 'who helps you?' (Partners). The sourcing of resources and savings through partnering with others is key - access to equipment and facilities, co-promotion of services, and support and feedback. This also helps highlight to would-be freelancers and self-employed contractors that they need networks, and that they're not alone!

From left to right the canvasses articulate how resources (interests, skills, networks) translate into a value proposition, which is then communicated (channels and relationships) to a customer - who rewards you for doing it... and hopefully the rewards on the right outweigh the costs on the left!

On Wednesday I had the rare pleasure of hosting Matthew Taylor, Chief Exec of the RSA, at Bath Spa University. He was with us to speak about ‘universities and place’ and the possibilities and challenges of how universities might position themselves in their locality alongside their simultaneous positioning in national league tables and international research rankings.

Matthew drew heavily on both his work with the Warwick University commission into into its civic role and on his family’s long-standing interest in the role that HEIs play in their landscape.

In a talk laced with sociological discussion he articulated his own theory of ‘social coordination’ and highlighted how HEIs had shifted over time from being highly solidaristic but insular communities into both more individualistic structures, beholden to markets, focused on innovation and enterprise, and driven by customer satisfaction, but also into authoritarian models driven by targets, rankings, and management cultures.

In the face of these individualistic and authoritarian models of motivating and organising universities we had lost much of our solidarity, much of our community. He then positioned ‘place’ as a way to regain that sense of a common cause.

Picking up John Goddard’s work on ‘Reinventing the Civic University’ he championed the idea of a ‘creative community with a cause’ and advocated cause-based leadership as a model for integrating authoritarian, solidaristic, and individualistic ways to motivate an organisation. Could ‘place’ be part of that cause? Can place be a distinctive feature for an HEI that no-one else can replicate? Can a focus on outreach and interactions stop us disappearing into our ivory towers?

His work with Warwick will advocate three main tenets of the university’s civic role:

That the university cannot be successful itself if its place is not. A global institution cannot thrive if its staff and students are living and working in a blighted or dysfunctional locality

That the university has to work hard to be more functional and coordinated in its civic activity, whilst “letting 1000 flowers bloom” has its merits, shouldn't we be harnessing that activity for a greater civic impact? Functionality might include sharing more data, engaging our alumni in the issues of the region, and introducing our new students and staff not just to the university, but to their region too.

That the university should be a platform for people to be experimental, that we should be an enabling player in the landscape, not a controlling one

He suggested we might sometimes need to be ‘creatively subversive’ in the face of local authorities who don’t understand the contribution and value of a university.

Here's (roughly) what I said earlier at today's #WHEFEvents Forum:

Lets start with a provocation - that 50% of the workforce will be freelance by 2020 - that might be extreme but the trend is definitely towards ever more precarious forms of employment. The 'job' is almost dead, the rise of portfolio careers, more consultants on contracts, and growing numbers of micro-businesses seems inexorable. Even if you get a job you'll be re skilling every 3 years anyway.

As the head of a careers service in a liberal arts university with twice the national average rate of graduate freelancers already - for me future employability looks a lot like entrepreneurship. 

So what does this mean to equate employability and entrepreneurship?

Firstly that employability needs to evolve; Careers Services, vocational education, and education more generally needs to move on from CVs and Interviews and embrace what good enterprise education has done for years - teaching our graduates how to generate, evaluate, scale, and sustain their ideas and aspirations. An employable graduate need not be enterprising but an enterprising graduate will be employable. Entrepreneurship is not a career path in and of itself, many entrepreneurs move in and out of more conventional employment, entrepreneurship is an ability to navigate in a complex environment, something all our students will need.

Secondly that enterprise education cannot remain a minority sport, we have to move on from just the self-selecting students (and staff) and take a few hostages who need us even if they don't want us. This means that bolted-on enterprise units and enterprise societies are not, as has already been highlighted, enough - we need to be more ambitious. However, we also need to be more subtle too... if you've ever worked in HE you'll know that students can be pretty instrumental about getting grades and pretty myopic about what they came to study - open elective units often fail because they are seen as 'too risky if I want a first' or 'not what my degree is about' - and thats fine if you want a small cohort of would-be entrepreneurs - but its nothing like enough if you want a generation of opportunity ready graduates operating in a precarious job market. 

To reach the students who need us but don't want us we have to be pervasive in their university experience - we need to talk to anatomy and zoology students about life-sciences commercialisation, we need to talk to archaeologists and historians about the commercial pressures in heritage management, we need to talk to them all about how you generate and evaluate and execute on ideas. We also need to reach out to students through their extra-curricular activities - I'm working with NUS to explore how we get more students who run clubs and societies to behave like businesses and move on from expecting grant hand-outs to generate sustainable and scalable business cases for their activities.

Thirdly - To my mind successful start-ups do not by and large arise from graduates fresh out of university, they arise from slightly older 20-30-somethings who have developed sector or skills competence and then focus a 'creative frustration' at some bitter experience theyve had which compels them to deliver something better. Many of our students are simply not bitter enough, not frustrated enough, and not competent enough yet to start something straight out of uni. I see the value of enterprise education as seeding that opportunity readiness for action at a later date. So again, in my mind, enterprise and employability are increasingly the same thing.

Finally - for me enterprise and entrepreneurship is not just about economic development, its about social, cultural, and intellectual development too. Lets think bigger than we have so far, lets get away from the lowest common denominator stuff and think bigger thoughts about how universities embed enterprise in their culture and encourage more people in, and to do more than just add to the bottom line of UK PLC

The definitional discussion continues between myself and Dr Bryan Mills - who definitely doesn't want another cupcake...

Do refer back to all 3 previous blog posts to follow this!

Starts here

Goes here

Then here

Now this:

I'm not entirely convinced we're heading irrevocably in the direction of enterprise over entrepreneurship as the default definition. I'm also not of the view that your views are any form of heresy. The heresy only creeps in when you become so dogmatically attached to a particular creed that the unorthodox becomes a threat - we're not there yet!

I'm still not wholly sure what the "it" is that you're calling enterprise - but this is a problem for all of us - especially whilst we all persist in changing the language of what we do for each and every audience to curry favour. I personally like the QAA guidelines' distinction between 'enterprise education' and 'entrepreneurship education'.

I agree with your points about "a more effective return" - that efficiency and impactfulness is core to all of our work - we're building capacity (knowledge, skills, mindset, confidence) to enact ideas - profitably, scalably, successfully, and ideally sustainably. I'd argue that the shift of enterprise away from earlier associations with capitalist endeavour is no bad thing - but it depends on how dogmatic you want to be about what enterprise, entrepreneurship, and success involve. It's not "another way", it's just putting the horse of enterprise before the cart of entrepreneurship, with the latter being a subset of the former (and probably a more exclusive, hard-won club to join).

Many of us have seized on the more inclusive and approachable definitions of enterprise because we're proselytizers who want to invite more people to join. Those who feel that the enterprise/entrepreneurship club is a more exclusive and rarefied crowd would probably be wanting to raise the bar of entry through those same definitions. 

Shoehorning more and more things into the enterprise category does dilute the value, I entirely agree. However I don't think employability is the answer. Personally I've often (maybe wrongly) associated employability with batch-processing students for the big graduate schemes - and enterprise has been a useful riposte to this that includes more options and is more about the individual's aspirations. Does supporting students for freelancing or portfolio careers count as enterprise or employability? Does skills development work around leadership, teamwork, or creative problem-solving count as enterprise or employability?

There is I guess a sliding scale of activities we deliver that runs from preparing students for entrepreneurship at one end to preparing students for graduate schemes at the other, enterprise and employability are somewhere in the middle of that scale and we all have different ideas about which activities fall into which categories.

As a riposte to your risk example of learning to surf - many classes actually start on the beach! People learn to move from kneeling to standing on dry land before they go near the water! I think there is a real place for safe-space enterprise education as a precursor to risk-management.

Research & Enterprise Development (RED) at the University of Bristol is recruiting a part-time graduate role for the 2014-2015 academic year providing an unparalleled opportunity to work at the cutting edge of social enterprise developing our online support for social entrepreneurship. We are looking for an engaged, organised, and articulate graduate with experience of designing websites and online portals.

The post is funded through the Unltd SEE Change programme for one year. The Unltd SEE Change programme is a HEFCE-funded  programme to support social enterprise and social entrepreneurs emerging from the Higher Education sector

The aim of the Scalable Social Entrepreneurship cluster is to support researchers at the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England to better engage with social enterprise – either through expert consultancy for existing social enterprises or through the creation of new social enterprises arising from university research.

The role in brief:

Social Enterprise Cluster Digital Developer

Supporting the work of the new Scalable Social Entrepreneurship Cluster in Bristol and Bath led by the University of Bristol, the University of the West of England, and Social Enterprise Works:

Developing and maintaining the online portal and networking platforms for the Bristol and Bath Social Enterprise Network (BBSEN)

Developing and maintaining the SEE Change online learning platform developed by Unltd to support emerging and scaling social entrepreneurs in Bristol and Bath

Researching local social entrepreneurs and socially-enterprising research communities who can be engaged through the Cluster and BBSEN

Continued development of the Scalable Social Entrepreneurship Cluster model with a view to finding more partners and funders to ensure lasting impact

Organisational support for an emerging series of social enterprise networking events to showcase the work of the cluster

  Structure of the post:

The post is:

Managed day-to-day by RED’s Third Sector Entrepreneur-in-Residence (Julie Ellison) as a contracted consultant.

Employed on a 4 days a week basis for 47 weeks between September 2014 and July 2015.

Paid an annual consultancy rate of £14-17,000 for the year based on skills and experience (equivalent to a year-long FTE of ~£19-23,000).

Provided with a desk-space and a laptop for the duration of the contract.

The post-holder will spend approximately 2 days a week based in Social Enterprise Works in central Bristol and a day a week at each of the University partners. It is anticipated that time will also be spent actively working with or in local social enterprises.

The post represents a fantastic development opportunity for a would-be social entrepreneur or a future third-sector business leader:

Genuine hands-on experience of running projects in a business environment

Develop contacts and networks of existing social entrepreneurs, business professionals, and funding bodies

Personal and Professional Development through training opportunities and daily interactions with social enterprise professionals

Technical skills development for websites, social media, and online learning tools

Exposure to hundreds of business ideas, examples of success and failure, and opportunities to improve your odds of entrepreneurial success in the future

  What are we looking for?

A recent graduate (since 2012) based close to Bristol and Bath

Enthusiastic, self-motivated individuals

Technical skills in web design, social media marketing, networking platform and online learning development. Coding skills an advantage but design skills and technical competence with content management systems and third-party tools is essential

Personal experience (successful or otherwise) of participating in an entrepreneurial business

An awareness of existing enterprise support for social entrepreneurs

A willingness to facilitate the success of other social entrepreneurs and their business ideas

Excellent communication and project-management skills

  The Application process:

Applications should include both a CV and Covering Letter and should be emailed direct to [email protected] by 12 midnight on Sunday 10th August

Candidates will be shortlisted for interviews to be held on the 18th August

Earlier this week I blogged about the latest 'inspiring enterprise' blog from RBS - making the case for embedding enterprise education in extra-curricular activities. My good friends at EEUK at one stage tweeted my blog alongside another member blog from Dr Bryan Mills.

The two blogs made for interesting bedfellows - there were some similarities (we both aired concern for the definition and dilution of 'enterprise') but we also struck different tones on the value of what might be called developmental activities that sometimes are (or should) be badged as enterprise. I argued to include more in our definition of enterprise education, Bryan flagged up some genuine concerns in the other direction. 

I was genuinely fascinated by Bryan's blog (less so by my own) and have decided to fashion a response... I'm not sure how far Bryan's tongue was in his cheek writing this so for simplicity's sake I'm going to take it at face value and hope I don't offend!

Bryan's contention that there is something 'fundamentally wrong' with enterprise education rather depends on what you define enterprise education as being or achieving. If the point is to create lean and mean capitalists with a singular pursuit of wealth and GDP then yes he's probably right. But I don't think that's the point, and even some of the biggest capitalist champions are having their doubts too.

Personally I see enterprise education (in the HE context anyway) as creating 'Opportunity Ready' graduates - be those opportunities to create fast-growth start-ups, to pursue successful careers in the private or public sector, to create social innovation, or simply to live fulfilling lives of their own determination. I just don't find GDP that motivating, or even that useful as measure of success.

There is also something here about what we expect to achieve through a student's time in university, surely some of those red-in-tooth-and-claw lessons are not the purview of a degree anyway? Is that what a university is for - more meat for the hedge funds?

It all reminds me of the familiar debate around who gets to be called an 'entrepreneur'? Personally I'm somewhere between the "You have to have started at least 5 companies and raised a £1000000" and "I'm an entrepreneur because I've got an app on the app store". What's important is that we share the scale of opinion with students who aspire to entrepreneurship and let them work it out for themselves.

Whilst I agree with Bryan that the definition of enterprise can be dilute to the point of being ethereal and that being all things to all people is dangerous, I would contend that much of what enterprise educators do is not so much sanitised as simply "generic". It's generic because we're trying to reach as many students as we can and that many of the activities Bryan is disillusioned about are useful as entry-level activities when you're trying to reach audiences that find the capitalist stuff hard to stomach.

Bryan's first contention is that without real risk the learning is lessened; that without failure and hazard we're not setting students up for reality. I agree, in part... A 'safe space for failure' is not the same as not allowing people to fail at all. Managing the learning environment to allow people to lose face, to lose some small amounts of cash, to have wasted time, is part of good enterprise education, but it can't be too steep a learning curve or many students will actually just leave... By all means develop an 'entrepreneurial finishing school' with really serious risks and traps for those who have passed through more developmental precursors - but this 'sink or swim' style could scar some genuine entrepreneurs who need to find their feet over time.

The classrooms of HE will always struggle to deliver really tough learning because of the commercial pressures of student recruitment and pastoral care, but actually the extra-curricular space can do this better.

The second contention around sympathy purchases I again agree with - but again its about finding safe starting points for students exploring business for the first time. A good enterprise educator and a good programme will be quick to start stretching student entrepreneurs beyond the sympathy product businesses. Those experiences might be building confidence and skills in a formative manner for tougher and more realistic challenges to follow. It's only a worry if its all you do.

Likewise the third contention around unrealistic pricing is fine if its an early and formative experience and well debriefed afterwards. When I work with student entrepreneurs I often bring in a 'time is money' exercise and start getting them to price their labour and include costs for the free space they might be receiving. But throwing it all in right at the start is disheartening and actually many successful entrepreneurs get started by being thoroughly delusional about their costs - but they adapt quickly when challenged. A little naivety at the start can provide the necessary momentum to get going.

I too have concerns about enterprise education being a "nice, eclectic, set of things" - but sometimes they're a means to an end. They are the top of a sales funnel, not the whole of the process. If you were told in lecture one that the commercial world would swallow you whole and spit out the bones unless you fought like hell to succeed then I suspect we'd lose a lot of people who can benefit from what we do as enterprise educators.

Britain is producing highly enterprising students but many have problems identifying themselves as such.

I've been banging on about embedding enterprise not just in the curriculum but in the extra-curricular experience at universities for some time now and this report provides some useful validation and analysis of the value of such activities.

Funded by RBS, researched by Voxburner, and inspired by the work of the ESSA (Enterprising Student Societies Accreditation) scheme run by Find Invest Grow (FIG).

This blog is more 'inspired by' the report than an 'analysis of' so I strongly recommend reading it - or at least the executive summary and recommendations.

The report highlights the current limitations of the word 'Enterprise' and the blank looks it receives from many students. This is despite the fact that many many students are really engaged by ideas, changing the world, starting projects, and developing their future skills. There is in effect a disconnect between what we professionals describe as 'enterprise' and the support that our students are seeking under other titles...

The ESSA scheme was built on the principle that enterprising societies were not the same as enterprise societies and likewise that enterprising students would not all be found in those enterprise societies or on enterprise courses. At present 'enterprise' is still for the self-selecting. 

Embedding enterprise in the curriculum has been one way to take those who are not self-selecting as 'hostages' and win them around. The validation of it being credit-bearing or within a discipline context has been a way to draw students in who might not otherwise associate with enterprise.

I have contended, as this report illustrates, that you can also embed in extra-curricular activities (and not simply through enterprise-specific groups). Student societies, sports clubs and volunteering projects all harness enterprising students and provide fantastic development opportunities for enterprise skills. However, it is again a process of smuggling and translation to win the hearts and minds of those for whom the enterprise word is toxic.

As the report illustrates, most students engage in extra-curricular activity to make friends, have fun, and engage in the activity offered. Whilst most are conscious it plays a role on their CV that development plays a lesser role in their reasons for engaging. There is a danger that if we overly subvert these activities to the enterprise or employability agendas we have failed to acknowledge why students engage in them.

Nonetheless, more and more students are seeing extra-curricular engagement as a critical part of their paid-for student experience and are determined to get maximum value from it so maybe we can enrich the student society experience without diluting the attractiveness.

Interestingly, according to this report, there is still some work to be done to win round students from poorer socio-economic backgrounds to the long-term value of these activities compared with part-time work and their degree studies. 

I always find that enterprise education works best when it taps into a students' existing motivations and provides the confidence and toolkit to act on those. This is potentially even more effective in extra-curricular activity than it is in the curriculum. 

Whilst some Students' Unions have embraced enterprise from an early stage, others have resisted it in the same manner as their students. Many universities have not made the connection either and continue to see their student activities in an 'amateur' mode rather than as a training ground for professional development. Even the NUS is guilty of having not prioritised student activities for many years.

However, all this is changing. The NSS continues to drive 'the student experience' up the agenda both universities and unions are exploring how they add value to the student activities offer at their institutions. Employability continues to dominate what students seek from their degree experience and employers continue to point to extra-curricular engagement as the differentiator between students with matching degrees. Careers Services and institutional skills award schemes increasingly acknowledge extra-curricular activities in more and more formal ways.

The NUS have actually just invited me to join their 'Student Opportunities Direction & Oversight Board' to represent enterprise for the first time. This follows a long fallow period in which student activities rather fell off their radar to pursue other agendas.

I've also become a trustee of Student Hubs - whose focus on students as agents of social innovation both during their studies and as future graduates. The explicit recognition of the value of embedding enterprise into student activities was one of the reasons I signed up!

Returning to the RBS report there are some interesting findings about the relative enterprise confidence of male and female students and also the difference that schooling and socio-economic class make to entrepreneurial ambition and capacity. Some of the differences would be hard to overcome in the curriculum alone, a joined-up strategy with extra-curricular activities is key.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/enterprise-for-all-the-relevance-of-enterprise-in-education

Lord Young’s Enterprise Education Review has been published today. Over the last nine months I’ve been involved in that Review, as part of the HE advisory panel. Whilst Lord Young has suggested these are “our ideas not his” I feel considerably less ownership of the resulting document than I had hoped to.

I agree and support many of the principles of this document but I have reservations about the implementation. Many of the problems we identified as an HE group appear here, but the nuanced solutions we sought to complex problems of metrics, ecosystems, connectivity, and institutional differentiation have not appeared. This may simply be naivety on my own part.

It is however genuinely satisfying to see government recognising the significance of enterprise education and the increasing value of fostering an enterprising attitude through the education process. Lord Young is a very passionate and authentic supporter of what we do and his expertise and enthusiasm should be credited. We have also witnessed an increasingly more nuanced understanding from government that enterprise is about more than just start-up entrepreneurship.

There are also some good case studies - so well worth reading!

The challenges for government in the HE sector are considerable and are chiefly about herding up existing good practice and trying to recommend something coherent that feels novel. This is difficult because the enterprise practices that have emerged over the last decade and more are rather diverse, which is what happens when enterprising people are left to their own devices. In many ways this review has been easier in the school and FE sectors and has struggled in a hugely autonomous HE sector. The danger is that where government can get us to agree is often at the lowest common denominator of principle and practice, and as such much of the sector has already moved on to greater (but more individualistic) things…

The two key elements of the review are the Future Employment and Earnings Record (FEER) and the Enterprise Passport.

The FEER is a new metric for the university league tables that prospective students use to select degree programmes. By using HMRC employment data for graduates in the 10 years following graduation, BIS is proposing to offer differentiating detail between the earning power and pattern of different programmes of study (and by implication between studying at different universities too).

Whilst choosing a degree and university is increasingly seen as a financial investment, and whilst universities do currently engage in some obfuscation about the value of their offer to prospective students I worry about the implications and implementation of this metrics.

Many of us have long sought a better measure of student employment data than the Destinations of Leavers of HE (DLHE) which takes place just six months out. By using HMRC data over a decade the picture of what graduates really go on to do could become much clearer. It should also give us a more accurate picture of graduate start-up rates. I can applaud this. However, I work at an institution that has a lot of ‘advantaged’ students with good personal networks and resources to fall back on; most of these students will do well regardless of what the university can add to them. Our grads will likely earn well regardless of their degree. Other institutions’ grads may not earn as well despite their degree potentially transforming their earning potential… IF the value-add offered by an institution and course is captured I will again applaud. However, if we start to see crude measures of future earnings being used as a way to measure universities and programmes then I fear for the sector.

I personally find the idea that prospective students will rate their degree choices by future earnings pretty abhorrent and that we will have lost something special about the degree experience. Universities are not just about employability and providing ready-made employees.

Lord Young acknowledges this concern and was quick to suggest this was not his intention. However, he felt it would take time to work out how to use it best. Like his Start Up Loans scheme, I worry that the first iteration will lack sector sensitivity and rub an awful lot of people up the wrong way before it matures into something I can begin to support as an educator.

The proposed Enterprise Passport is a digital record of approved enterprise activities in which a student has participated at some stage in their education from primary school onwards. The ambition here is that this becomes an addition to the CV and a mark of skills competency for employers. The formalisation will help educational institutions take this seriously and future employers can use it as a selection aid.

I wholly support the principle of recording enterprise achievements and trying to develop a pipeline through the educational system right through to employment. My reservation is about what makes the list of activities that are endorsed? This is not yet clear. We don’t yet know who is deciding and on what criteria an activity is enterprising. We strongly recommended the review take up the definitions of enterprise and entrepreneurship education framed by the QAA’s ‘Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Education: Guidance for UK HE providers’ - but this seems to have been a missed opportunity. At present all the definition of those terms seems to come from Lord Young himself despite the expertise available to him. The Passport may well create a ‘verification’ model for some forms of enterprise education that so far is based on no real research into what works.

There are four specific recommendations for HEIs:

Firstly the availability of an elective enterprise module available to all students. Great! I do wholly support this although it is the lowest common denominator activity and these ‘bolt-on’ open units are often poor relations to enterprise programmes that are embedded into degree disciplines. Students and staff seem to respond better when enterprise is contextualised as part of their discipline. Likewise elective units attract the self-selecting entrepreneurs and we should be taking more hostages and converting them. Nonetheless a positive step.

Secondly an active and supported enterprise society in every university. Great! I wholly support this too. I would also stress that enterprise societies by themselves are not a complete solution, they are another basic fix for largely self-selecting students and only part of a genuine ecosystem. I am pleased to see that NACUE’s objectives and metrics are being reviewed to ensure sustainability of the societies that emerge. I would like to see more acknowledgement of the role of educators in delivering this kind of activity alongside societies.

Thirdly, Business Schools that hold Small Business Charter status are encouraged to develop start-up programmes for commercial and social enterprises. Lord Young does acknowledge that not every university has a business school, let alone a chartered one, and this is a weakness in an otherwise well-principled idea. Start-up programmes are increasingly emerging in universities but they often have no relationship with a business school. If the Small Business Charter evolves beyond its business school initial bias then I am supportive. The need to link the elements of the enterprise eco-system (business schools, enterprise societies, incubator spaces, students’ unions, and social enterprise) is key, the devil will be in who leads this at each institution…

There is a continued push towards universities becoming conduits towards Start Up Loans; despite the sector largely feeling that recommending loans is something we find unethical and unwieldy as educational institutions whose students have already incurred enough loan debt. I would still want to see more focus on alternative sources of start up funding.

Finally the Duke of York will be patron to a new ‘E-Star’ award that acknowledges universities delivering strong enterprise outcomes for their students. This will be a new category for universities added to the National Business Awards each November and starting in 2015. It will acknowledge good practice from universities in supporting enterprise through the work of their societies, their graduate start-up numbers, their support provision - but strangely seemingly not their curricular provision despite that being celebrated in the review’s attached case studies. This seems positive, although again the devil will be in the detail. Exactly what the criteria will be and who the judges are remains to be seen.

Overall there is a lot of potential here - and probably that is potential to do good. My worry is the implementation of many of these initiatives; if they are done quickly and crudely then the damage will be substantial. If the nuances and diversity of the sector is recognised then actually it could be transformational in terms of the significance and coherency of enterprise education in UK HE.

I should stress that this is only a review, a set of recommendations, that government need not even endorse…

I like this article (please check it out before reading on), I think it nails some very salient points about what research intensive universities are getting wrong in some regards. We do, to a large degree, have researchers (accidentally at best are they teachers) teaching all their students to be world class researchers when they know that academia is in fact already saturated with researchers.

A degree from a research intensive institution has questionable special value outside of research academia. It proves you were clever at 18 (and hopefully we haven't damaged you since), that you can study (which is important for grad paths where further study is obligatory), and that you may have gained a variety of social and survival skills. It often proves little else of value to employers. I agree rather more strongly than I'd want to with this somewhat damning assessment.

Why those top universities remain targets for graduate recruiters is a curious mix of: tradition, validating the previous education choices of now graduated recruiters, the fact that we don't harm clever 18 year olds too much over 3-4 years, and a lack of imagination from all involved. How newer and more teaching focused institutions have not surpassed us in becoming targets for recruiters is either damning on them, snobbery on the part of recruiters, or simply that most universities have a neutral impact on students and those who are brightest at 18 remain brightest at 21.

I am, like the original author, exaggerating for effect, but not as much as I wish I was.

The article nonetheless does rather miss the value of academic research and researchers, which is important actually! But that nuance is lost to a good line of argument about universities not being fit for purpose as a training ground for the modern workforce.

Research intensive universities are not really fit for purpose as educational establishments for most students entering the workforce. But in their defence, they weren't designed to be! Or even when they were designed to be they decided that research was more interesting and got distracted.

Nonetheless we are raising scientific and cultural literacy, no doubt, and turning out the world-class researchers of the future, but we're short-changing the majority I think. 

Now enterprise education is, in part, an answer to this. By teaching some useful real-world knowledge in a subject-sympathetic embedded manner we can deliver both academic standards and practical value. Teaching units that explore the commercialisation of ideas or the impact of commercial decision-making on scientific or cultural endeavours can be academically robust and practically useful.

Our students seem to really rate our annual enterprise 'bootcamp' - Spark - check out their feedback!

Our annual Spark programme is just about the best thing we do. It’s short, sweet, and gets amazing feedback. However it’s cost-effective only on the basis of the ripple effect it creates both in student engagement and staff morale, but it has become a lynchpin in the annual strategy nonetheless.

In 2012 and 2013 100% of feedback gave the course 4/5 or 5/5 for being ‘enjoyable’, ‘interesting’ and ‘useful’. The 5/5 rating has hovered around 90% for about 5 years. The feedback also highly rated the course for ‘motivation’, ‘inspiration’ and ‘skills development’.

In 2013 the students that attended Spark gained over 30% greater confidence in how to build a business around their own ideas. This has been a gradually rising statistic since 2008. Interestingly students initial levels of aspiration and confidence have dropped every year but they all end up at the same final level each time! We think this is because Spark is increasingly just one thing we do and some of the more entrepreneurial students now get their support by other means and Spark is more of an 'entry-level' activity.

Enterprise boot-camps and crash courses are hardly innovative these days, almost everyone seems to run one, but ours is around a decade old and I’m currently engaged in planning the 7th event of my tenure! It’s been held in seven different venues and has varied from a 3.5-day long weekend model to an almost 5-day week long model, but the basic structures and elements are pretty much unchanged.

Ours always starts with the Confucius Quote: “Do a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” and always ends with a Dragons’ Den finale with a cash prize and a reminder of that Confucius quote! We stress that good businesses are built on a passion and not on get-rich-quick motives. You'll need a geeky level of passion to get through the tough times that no amount of money could bait you through.

We always the start the programme with a day or two of general enterprise introduction, with team-work exercises, values exercises, and a lot of brainstorming. Then we get all the participants to give very quick pitches and form up into teams for the remainder of the programme. The latter half of the programme is expert start-up guidance and interactive sessions developing ideas ready for the Dragons.

We have young entrepreneurs share their stories every evening, and we invite local professionals and entrepreneurial alumni to come back as Dragons and judge the entries on the final night. We used to just have pitches in the finale but we’ve moved to an exhibition model with the Dragons wandering the stalls and grilling the would-be entrepreneurs. This is more engaging for the entrepreneurs and more demanding on the teams to field all the questions!

We include some live challenges, some physical activity, and some challenges to go and ‘make stuff’ and ‘talk to a real customer’.

The ideas are usually a pretty mixed bag as most emerge in a very short time; but we do stress that Spark is just a practice run for the real thing. We get social and commercial ideas in roughly equal measure and we also get a pretty decent gender balance on the programme too.

The cost-benefit analysis will nonetheless always say we spend a lot of staff time and money on just 40 students for just 5 days. However, those students have had a fantastic record of joining enterprise societies and Enactus groups, of running those groups, and of being fantastic ambassadors and champions for what we do.

They have a ripple effect in a wider student population. It’s also a great way to involve our alumni and local business professionals and alumni who continue to give back and support our work. They love the intensive atmosphere and the energised students. It’s good for our own staff because it is so energising and helps us build genuinely engaged relationships with the students that encourage them to continue to work with us on their ideas throughout the year.