Lord Peter Mandelson gave a key-note speech following an invitation by the Oxford Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Saïd Business School. In his address he used an imaginary female entrepreneur to underline his argument that markets and ministerial policies need to go hand in hand in order to create the right conditions for an “enterprise-led recovery”.
“Think about it for a moment. The high tech entrepreneur who commercialises an innovative low carbon technology has not usually thought up the whole thing from scratch and built it in her garden shed. She is building on technological education, or perhaps the skills she learnt in further education. She’s drawing on the UK’s science base. She’ll need access to finance to support trials of pre-commercial technology, and that means investors patient enough to sit it out while she gets it right. Assuming she can get funding to trial her product, she’ll often need access to the facilities to do so. When she gets her company off the ground, if she wants to stay in the UK, she’s going to be totally reliant on highly educated staff with the right niche skills. […] Both her own skills and the skills of the people she employs come from our higher and further education systems. Those systems, more even than they are now, need to be tailored to the demands of a knowledge economy. Producing people capable of managing complex systems and technologies and confident enough to innovate and lead.”
He branded views often espoused by pure-breed market economists about government’s primary function to “get out of businesses’ way” as short-sighted as they did not account for what enterprise needs in order to work. “In a globalised economy based on high levels of knowledge, skill and innovation, enterprise needs an active government in many respects.” In summary what enterprises and business need is a government with the resources and policies that help to create and nurture an enterprise economy.
The Oxford Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation promotes an ethos of entrepreneurship being nurtured within a publicly and privately sponsored ecosystem. Originally established under the “Science Enterprise Challenge” it continues to receive its primary funding from the Higher Education and Innovation Fund (HEIF). The funding enables the Centre to serve as a focal point for entrepreneurship research, teaching and training at the University of Oxford. The Centre tirelessly strives to promote an “entrepreneurial culture” within the wider University through its free courses, programmes and corporate networks. These efforts are starting to pay off. Oxford University has recently been ranked as one of the top ten university start-up communities worldwide by YouNoodle and the Centre’s “Building a Business” lectures are among the top ten downloads in the Apple iTunesU section with several thousand downloads per week.