My intention is certainly not to marginalise – as you know I am a great advocate of enterprise – whether that requires a business to be started to not. In my world everyone would have access to a free, high quality coach to help them develop skills and confidence and to consider how they develop the economic and social engines that they need.

Absolutely happy to help you present this thinking to both private sector and philanthropic investors.

My only worry is that by defining enterprise and community in these ways, ways I accept, that the individual who needs to start their own business out of necessity or circumstance is marginalised. In other words regarded as ‘not worth’ enabling with the skills, know how and confidence to succeed.

Government have never understood that if we enable 100 long term unemployed, with the right learning by doing and support, 6 of them will go on to build substantial enterprises. However, we don’t know which 6 at the beginning. Government are only bothered about their selective potential high growth businesses and future entrepreneurs (employers like the Dragons, Sugar et al) and innovative hi tec graduates and post graduates. Naturally i’m interested in enterprise skills and know how for these too and the many enterprising individuals you describe but i don’t want to exclude everyone having the skill and know how to develop an offer they can sell to a customer for a price that makes a profit and is paid in a timely way to allow incomings to be ahead of their outgoings.

So there is a real opportunity to place high quality learning and support for enterprise skills and know into communities. This, in my view, needs to be enabled by the private and social enterprise sectors not government agencies. The best thing I can do at SFEDI is convince enough of the private sector to invest in your approach.

A great blog I tripped across after writing my own piece on enterprise education. I agree that there is too much of a focus on the business element of enterprise days and as a skills set many students are subsequently missing out. I have suggested that more cross curricular links like you mentioned need to be developed but how would you suggest the removal of the sterotype this topic now has?

Community is a more difficult concept, because it’s much more fluid – ideas of mutual self-interest are in a constant state of flux. The usual rationale for buildings and services is to meet needs identified by a community rather than to ‘build’ community, but as with enterprise, people often claim they’re doing more than they actually are, and the further up the bureaucratic ladder you go, the more outrageous the claims. My own bugbear is the phrase ‘delivering sustainable communities’ – as if such a thing could ever be delivered by one group of people to another.

Thanks for a very powerful piece of writing. Deserves to be the post – not a comment!

All this time, the mother bird is somehow beguiled by this interloper and, following her mother’s instinct, will feed the thing as her own child, even when it grows to monstrous size, dwarfing even her. It is said by some that the cries of the young cuckoo are irresistible for the mother whose real offspring are long dead. After it’s abyssmal hunger has been continually sated, and it is fed to maturity, it takes it’s final flight, seeking to eventually repeat this dark process.

So when you hear the plaintive cries of the cuckoo bird, you hear an entity that is saying “feed me, for I am yours now!” “harken to my song, though I am an alien thing of murder and deceit” “carry my seed and my burden, for it is your nature to be used”

Many capital ventures ARE very much like the cuckoo. And this is a fearful thing.