Entrepreneurs Unwrapped

Understanding how Britain thinks about entrepreneurship is vital if we are to build a society which enables and encourages more people to launch a business. In Entrepreneurs Unwrapped, kindly supported by American Express, we sought to do exactly that.

By surveying both those who have never started a business and current founders, we painted a picture of what Britain really thinks about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, and revealed where similarities and contrasts can be drawn between the two groups.

What Applied Learning Really Looks Like

Applied learning provides opportunities for young people to use their classroom learning in real-life, practical situations. This not only helps reinforce the learning but also enhances its relevance to young people, who can begin to appreciate how that learning can support future careers and life goals.

In What Applied Learning Really Looks Like, published in partnership with Young Enterprise, Anton Howes highlights several successful case studies to show teachers and policymakers what applied learning actually looks like in practice – particularly in cases where time and resources are limited. The report sets out concrete examples of applied learning in action to inspire teachers and help them articulate their vision to colleagues, managers, and parents, as well as how headteachers and senior leadership teams can support them.

APPG for Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurship Education

How can we equip young people with the skills to succeed in a fast-changing world of work? Entrepreneurship Education, a new paper by Finn Conway for the APPG for Entrepreneurship, explains the benefits of teaching young people how to start and grow a business. The report reveals that while young people have a huge desire to work for themselves, entrepreneurship education in schools is not integrated into the curriculum.

The report calls on the government to develop and publish a Youth Entrepreneurship Strategy for Schools, which would set out key skills it wants young people to develop, and to provide funding to encourage entrepreneurs from more representative backgrounds to visit and engage with schools.

Inspiring Innovation

In Inspiring Innovation, the latest Female Founders Forum report produced in partnership with Barclays, Aria Babu looks at female entrepreneurship in the high-growth sectors such as e-commerce, fintech, and greentech.

She makes three broad recommendations for boosting female entrepreneurship, namely: closing the gender funding gap, which currently sees female founders raising only 15% of all equity finance; tackling STEM drop-off rates, which have resulted in just 17% of tech workers being women; and providing more female role models, given that mentorship has proven to be an effective way of encouraging women to start and scale businesses.

Educating Future Founders

Entrepreneurship education has traditionally taken place at universities, but there is strong evidence that earlier interventions can develop non-cognitive skills that are key to entrepreneurial success, such as creativity, persistence, and communication.

In Educating Future Founders, we recommend that governments invest in randomised control trials to gather evidence on interventions to boost entrepreneurship, and use the results to promote entrepreneurship education at a secondary level.

Here and Now

Though women make up just a fifth of business owners, we are seeing increasing numbers setting up companies, and receiving a growing share of investment. In Here and Now, we reveal that while 11% of startups that raised equity investment for the first time in 2011 were female-founded, by 2018, that figure had nearly doubled. We also show that, once funded, the percentage of female-founded startups that raised additional rounds of capital was similar to non-female-founded firms. 

In order to close the gender gap for good, our report makes recommendations for the government, schools, the media, and venture capitalists – from shining a light on female entrepreneurs, to tackling the STEM drop-off rates among girls in education.

Future Founders

In Future Founders, we set out to understand how young people think about entrepreneurship. Through polling of 14-25 year olds, we gained an insight into the aspirations, intentions, and motivations of the next generation of potential entrepreneurs. We found that over half have thought about, or already have, started a business – and only 15% said they had no intention of starting one. We also found that respondents who have a friend or family member who have started a business are more likely to do the same – suggesting that exposure to entrepreneurship is infectious. 

The results of our polling allow us to conclude that the ability to solve social problems might be a more persuasive reason to start a business than getting rich quickly, that more needs to be done to promote relatable entrepreneurial role models, and that simply not knowing where to start remains the single biggest barrier to founding a business.

APPG for Entrepreneurship: Enterprise Education

To thrive in the modern world, Britain’s next generation must be adaptable to change. Up until relatively recently, a job for life was both possible and preferable. It’s increasingly neither. Universities have been central to many of the great intellectual revolutions across history – now they must embrace enterprise education to imbue students with the necessary enterprising skills to flourish in the twenty-first century.

Government has a role to play. Political action — or inaction — has significant repercussions for how enterprise education is delivered. This report aims to inform the government about the successes, challenges and opportunities for delivering enterprise education at universities. Its recommendations are based on responses to a Call for Evidence and aim to work with the grain of the latest thinking and practice.