GEC: Entrepreneurs - Your country needs you
Source: The Times
Doug Richard is the founder of School for Startups and host of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills initiative, Web Fuelled Business.
This year is set to be one of the toughest economic environments in recent history, and it has never been clearer that we cannot just rely on multi-national corporations to create new jobs and opportunities.
We must instead champion the entrepreneurs, the small and the young companies who are the wealth and job creators that will haul us out of this recession. Our economy depends on sustaining these businesses.
The small group of young businesses that survive the perils of their first few years and then scale to become larger companies are the foundations of all economic prosperity in the western world.
Businesses of fewer than 50 employees account for 99.2 per cent of the UK’s total stock of companies and 47.1 per cent of private sector employment.
The young startups with the potential to scale are the change makers that not only create jobs, but they have the ability to make things better or faster for the rest of us.
But young businesses are very fragile and their high mortality rate is evidence of that.
Thus, we as a country have a desire for more businesses to start and for more of them to survive. Real support must be given to both young businesses starting out, and those small businesses that are growing fast.
We must focus attention on the difficulties that young businesses face, whether it is accessing capital, more effectively utilising the web, or creating a sustainable business model around an innovative idea.
Importantly, people in the UK need to realise that anyone can run their own business, that successful entrepreneur courses are less about teaching and more about empowering. We’ve got to put people in a position where they feel they can do something.
The Global Entrepreneurship Congress (GEC) is an inspirational gathering of entrepreneurs, thought-leaders, economists and policy makers that will celebrate enterprise and encourage those with the ‘can-do’ spirit to turn their dreams into an ambitious reality.
The host city of the GEC, Liverpool, is a hub for creativity and business. This is the reason I am bringing the Web Fuelled Business programme to the city in March, in an intensive effort to help small businesses exploit the web to its fullest extent.
This is a key time for entrepreneurs in the UK. If we want to boost entrepreneurial growth, then we must unleash the full potential of our startups. By backing the small businesses that represent all of our opportunity, we are helping to set the stage for stimulating the economy.
[Image: Doug Richard]
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