How to Destroy an Enterprise Culture

This is the title of a workshop I am submitting to the International Conference on Enterprise Promotion, taking place in Harrogate next month.  Don’t know yet if it will be accepted as it bends the ‘submission guidelines’ a little.

Workshop Aims

• To illustrate how and why most contemporary interventions designed to promote enterprise usually have precisely the opposite effect;
• To demonstrate how narrow conceptions of enterprise serve to undermine the value of enterprise development for both funders and citizens and sells our profession short;
• To outline ‘in which direction progress lies’ if we really want to develop more enterprising behaviours in the community;

Conclusions

• We (policy makers, professionals and community leaders) need to re-conceive what we mean by ‘enterprise’ and ‘enterprise development’ and understand more fully its relationship to ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘business development’ and ‘community’.
• We need to adopt much more ambivalent approaches to ‘entrepreneurship’, of all kinds, if we really wish to engage ‘community’.
• We need to take seriously the principles of person centred development in our work to teach people how to live a ‘becoming existence’ and pay serious attention to a credo that says above all ‘Do No Harm’.

Sounds interesting?  See you in Harrogate.  Or get in touch.

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