Seeking the 'Entrepreneurial'

A couple of weeks ago I attended an event in London, organised by the National Centre for Entrepreneurship in Education on the Entrepreneurial Institution. It was a really stimulating day and I would want to praise the organisers for putting together an interesting and thought provoking programme. It has, however, taken me a couple of weeks to think through some of the implications of what was being said and how this relates to some of my own thinking. If entrepreneurship is going to have a place in my model for the New Collegiality then it is going to be under the general heading of 'innovation and flexibility'. One serious question, however, is whether 'entrepreneurship' is the right word for what it is that I am really trying to get at within my own model.

Earlier in the academic year we held a focus group at Birmingham as part of a wider project on teaching and the curriculum. At that focus group colleagues were asked to look at the values that were set out by the University as they relate to teaching and learning. The group endorsed all the stated values apart from 'entrepreneurship'. It was not that they were against entrepreneurship as such, it was that they did not think that this was the right term, or perhaps the most useful term, to express the values that they wanted to endorse and to encourage staff and students to engage with. The general feeling was that entrepreneurship was too closely associated with Dragon's Den type start ups, too closely focussed on business and those who wanted to go into business. While it was recognised that it was perfectly possible to be entrepreneurial in social work, the health service, in art and culture and even in education, the term did not sit easily within many disciplines and would not, so the group thought, encourage the desired behaviours in the students. Unfortunately, despite a number of attempts, they could not really come up with a suitable alternative.

The NCEE event opened with an introduction from Paul Hannon who stressed that we needed to widen our understanding of entrepreneurship and begin to see how the values and behaviours that the term implied could be embedded throughout the institution; among students, among staff and as a key value/behaviour for the institution as a whole. This event was focussed primarily at the institutional level, but it was clearly recognised that this was not going to happen unless the individuals within the institution were also working in an entrepreneurial fashion and with entrepreneurial values.

When Paul, and the other speakers, began to define the term, isolate the values and behaviours that it might contain, and to offer examples of entrepreneurship in practice, then a number of key ideas kept being repeated. I do not intend to outline all of these, this is not an NCEE blog, but there were a number that struck me, either because of the centrality of the ideas, or perhaps because of their novelty. These all relate to what I have called, in my model, innovation and flexibility.

The first is creativity. Entrepreneurship is about new ideas. Creativity is not, of itself, entrepreneurial, but entrepreneurship cannot exist without creativity. Of course this is not just creativity in terms of original ideas, but it is also related to new processes, new ways of looking at old problems, new methods of working and so on. It is that willingness to try something new and to see how it works. This leads on to the second point that struck me, which is the need for flexibility and/or freedom. Creativity is only valuable if it is able to be expressed. There are two sides to this, one is a willingness to listen to, and hence to encourage, new ideas however odd they may seem at first, the second is the courage to test them out. This does not mean that we should not be critical, or even careful in our analysis and project planning, we just need to be more open. Finally, therefore, and perhaps most significantly for many Universities, entrepreneurship as it was presented to us, very explicitly on more than one occasion, was being willing to allow failure and to learn from failure, to live with a little bit more risk. This is something that we find difficult to instil in our students, certainly something that we are bad at celebrating among our staff, and something that many HE institutions would find very difficult to encourage as an institutional value. It is, however, perhaps something we should think about a little bit more...