Category Archives: Learning

School for Social Entrepreneurs launches new school in Liverpool

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Exciting news: The Liverpool SSE has been launched, with the support of Liverpool City Council and Business Liverpool. We’re hopeful this will be done with nationally-renowned Blackburne House as the lead agency. It’s an exciting intiative, and we hope to complement existing provision and build on the great work already being done in a traditionally entrepreneurial area. The support from Councillor Flo Clucas has been instrumental in making it happen, something she has wanted to achieve since she met Michael Young back in 1998.

You can read a little more here in the Liverpool Echo:

“Nick Temple, Network Director for
London-based SSE, said since the project started eight years ago 85% of
the ventures created are still trading, which is double conventional
business rates.

We
know 91% of our fellows create jobs; on average 35 jobs to every 10
fellows and 70 voluntary positions. More than 60% report a 6% increase
in turnover and on top of that, they are delivering services to
beneficiaries in their communities. Sustainability is very strong.

The
SSE combines business and commerce with a strong social mission across
health, transport, environment, education and child care.

He
said Liverpool was chosen as the first north west SSE because of its
strong entrepreneurial pedigree, adding: “We are looking to add to or
complement what is already being done here.”

Just to correct a couple of those statistics (I’m impressed how many the journalist got down given the length/swiftness/garbledness of our conversation):

–  It is true that 85% of organisations established during the SSE programme are still in existence; it is only true to say that this is roughly double conventional business survival rates for our older cohorts (82% for our 1998 cohort, as opposed to 43% for conventional business, for example); on average, across all years, we beat conventioanl survival rates by at least 15%.

– Actually, 60% report an increase in turnover; on average this is a six-fold increase, rather than a six per cent one…which is slightly different…and much better.

All these figures our from our recent evaluation by the replicas relojes españa, of which more soon….anyway, all in all we’re delighted to be expanding the network in the north-west, and look forward to some great success stories up in Liverpool in the years to come.

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Entrepreneurship education

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At SSE we like to tackle the big questions in life: If a tree falls in a wood and no-one’s there, does it make a sound? What is the meaning of life?  Where is Timbuktu? And, of course, are entrepreneurs born not made?

A similar poser is "Can entrepreneurship be taught?", to which one might add, "or can it be learned?" There’s no easy answers here, but SSE certainly recruits on the basis of character traits and life experience, rather than paper qualifications. What might be a more interesting version is "Can entrepreneurship be learned in an educational institution?" This is particularly relevant because a lot of the skills that employers are looking for are possessed by entrepreneurs: innovation, flexibility, cross-cutting skills, adaptability, self-reliance and so forth. As a result, there is a lot of interest in teaching entrepreneurship, and social entrepreneurship, in schools.

The most famous and long-lasting of these has been Young Enterprise, which encourages students at school to set up actual business/enterprises in a learning-by-doing kind of way, primarily outside of the normal school day. The Young Foundation are looking at something more radical still, in the form of Studio Schools; as they put it:

"The idea of a studio school hangs on the central feature of a series of
operating businesses run by the students themselves. As small schools
closely linked to particular industries, participant numbers would be
capped at 300 per school and the staff would comprise a mix of teachers
and non-teachers with business expertise."

Which reminds me of an even more radical US experiment that I read about, under which the whole school had its own money, courts and taxation. Now that is learning by doing….

Other initiatives with a particularly social entrepreneurial leaning have been put in place by Changemakers and Cantilever (offshoot of CAN), though they battle the limits of the curriculum. If entrepreneurship inevitably contains risk and failure, can it happen in the classroom?

Or, as this article suggests, do most entrepreneurs simply get on with it from a young age, be  it via the paper round, selling to school friends, or, in some unusual cases, running a lemonade stand that gives money to charity…..youngest social entrepreneur of the week award….

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DUELISEF + CSR

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There’s a couple of acronyms to get our teeth into on a Friday afternoon: ones for the acronym-buster in due course.

– DUELISEF stands for Duke University Enterprising Leadership Incubator Social Entrepreneurship Fellowship. Oh yes. Brought to my attention by fellow blogger Audeamus who covers similar ground, but with more of an international leaning. Anyway, there’s an article from one of the ELI (as they shorten it) Fellows called a Discourse on Social Entrepreneurship which makes decent reading.

– CSR is more widely-known, of course, as corporate social responsibility (sometimes shortened to CR or changed completely to Corporate Community Investment…CCI). Thinking about it today because Business in the Community have announced their 2006 Awards for Excellence (in a teacherly manner, the winning companies get a Big Tick).

Marks and Spencers were the overall winners with SSE friends Happy Computers winning Small Company of the year, which is well deserved. See the full list here, which is, encouragingly, extraordinarily long!

I’ll be helping to judge the ‘Innovation’ award of CAF’s CCI awards in the next few months, which should be equally encouraging and inspiring, and bring many more examples to our attention….

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Lucca Leadership

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Interesting meeting with Tim Munden of Lucca Leadership today. They are an international organisation which runs week-long transformational leadership courses…

“…which enable young people of all nationalities and backgrounds to
discover their purpose, clarify their vision and develop the skills
needed to make change happen for the benefit of their communities,
nations and, ultimately, humanity itself”

Read more about their vision/approach, and their different programmes.

What struck me in our conversation was the common ground between their work and ours at the SSE. Using a project as a vehicle for learning, recruitment on the basis of values/qualities/life experience, diversity of intake, and the importance of reflection and dialogue. All makes me wonder whether programmes for social entrepreneurs (who could equally be called community leaders, or entrepreneurial leaders) would benefit from a greater emphasis on a transformational leadership
process. As the Lucca website puts it,

“It is an approach to leadership that creates sustainable solutions,
and avoids solutions that benefit some at the expense of others.”

Which could, in some cases, be a way of defining social entrepreneurship as well.

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Demos, Orange and Working Progress

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DemosIt’s not often I find myself at the same event as Digby Jones, Director General of the CBI, but such was the case this morning at the launch of the Orange-sponsored Demos report, Working Progress, part of their Organisational Literacy programme. The research focuses on how young people and organisations (workplaces) can be reconnected, arguing that, currently, there is a significant and damaging disconnect between them.

While some of the findings might not seem revelatory to those working in learning and people development, there are some interesting findings and recommendations that are relevant to both the support and training for social entrepreneurs (who are often future employers and/or employees) and to the importance of values-led business in the 21st century.

– 88% of British employees think it is important that the organisation they work for is committed to living its values; only 45% believe that their employer does

– creativity and innovation are the skills that most business people think will be most important in 2010, followed by flexibility/multitasking, communication (of ideas), and problem-solving

– in 1983, 35% of people judged an organisation primarily by the quality of its products, while 15% judged it by its honesty and integrity; in 2006, the respective figures were 19% (quality product) and 21% (honesty/integrity) [NB – worth noting that profitability rose from 11% to 18% in the same period]

– organisations should recognise work-life balance as a skill (or set of skills) to be taught, and performance against that skill to be monitored as with other areas

– that peer-to-peer support and networks are increasingly important for current and future employees

– the Government should introduce a "skills portfolio" to help capture some of the learning, skills and aptitudes that are often not reflected in traditional qualifications

In social entrepreneurship terms, for example, we can point to our focus on making a practical project the focus/vehicle for learning (achieving those skills that employers want), on our emphasis on peer support and peer-learning networks, on our measurement of work-life balance as a skill that people need, and on the relevance and timeliness of values-led, more-than-profit organisations. The SSE, indeed, features as a case study in the research for its pioneering work with peer-led action learning and mentoring.

Demos/Orange were looking at this very much in terms of young people but, as was pointed out in the discussion, learning now takes place at all ages and in all areas, many of which are outside traditional educational institutions. So there are interesting lessons, perhaps, for learning providers considering how well we are supporting/training people not only to deliver on their own goals and establish their own initiatives, but also how well we are preparing them for the wider world at work.

Judging from this report, and our own experience, the answer would seem to be "pretty well". When one considers that employers will be seeking values-led, flexible, innovative, problem-solving, multitasking individuals, social entrepreneurs should have a rosy future, be they within or without larger organisations.

As for the event, Digby Jones inevitably caused a stir by banging on about numeracy and literacy, the need for efficiency in the public sector, and what the private sector can bring to the public and voluntary sector (without recognising the vice versa); his unanswered question was, with reference to work-life balance, "can we have it all?" The other speakers, including Kevin Steele, chief exec of Enterprise Insight [who had some big, hairy questions as well: What is education for? (discuss the elephant in the room!) and Does education take too long?] and Wes Streeting (VP of NUS), were inevitably somewhat overshadowed but the whole report made for valuable discussion and, at least on one table, pretty heated debate.

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