A drive to turn the whole world into entrepreneurs

I agree everybody should try and obtain the class designation
of entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is however changing infrastructure,
something an engineer is qualified for. So I think a better
employment goal is engineer; if the computer provided references
and testing anybody can try to do some engineering. As well if
engineering was facilitated over the internet their would be no age,
geographical or time restriction.

I think it's a huge problem and one that the main stream media seems to have completely failed to recognise, or report on, that there has been an organised and quite sinister conspiracy against SME's in this Country - led by the banks and allowed by the Government and its regulators (hopefully the regulators are now addressing this). There was a time when banks and bankers recognised how important it was to support the forward thinking enthusiasm and bravery of the entrepreneur. The combination of good business ideas mixing with good supportive banking has forged some great Companies and a huge amount of employment in the UK.

However, at the beginning of the millennium, some banks (thinking of a couple in particular) decided it wasn't enough to be the bank behind a Company, it could maximise its own profits by owning it or, even without owning it, they wanted to have full control over it. Thousands of SME's found their banks were not only taking an over active interest, they were calling the shots on how the business should be run – and suddenly, it was being run exclusively for the benefit of the banks and at great cost to the business itself. Worse still, the invention of various bizarre financial instruments by the banks meant that in some instances the best way forward was to loan companies money, then pull the loans, put the companies into pre-pack administration, create new companies with the assets and give the new companies (run by bank related people) new loans. Result – massive loan books and therefore massive bonuses for bankers at a cost of destroying good SMEs.

Because the banks couldn't be seen to do this first hands and be Shadow Directors, they brought in an army of consultants, auditors and other third parties to do this work for them. And they in turn had their own best interests at heart. None of these people, not the bankers (who have shown the world how totally incompetent they are as business men) or any of the third parties, had any entrepreneurial talent or spirit. None of them cared about SMEs or their employees. End result? Thousands of perfectly good businesses have gone down the pan, thousands of jobs lost and all to feed a monster of greed and self interest by banks.

For the very best example of this, check out this article. http://www.ianfraser.org/?p=910. We can have as many back slapping conventions and seminars as we like but, until this Government gets rid of the rot in the banking system, I think entrepreneurs are best off keeping their brilliant ideas in their own heads.

Indeed we live in exciting times, thanks mostly to technology. Everyone can, or aspire reasonably to, be an entrepreneur...of sorts. Better yet, new forms of worthwhile and sustainable enterprise burgeon now and foreseeably. But, rather like the process of globalisation, there are and will be very real issues of capacity, which is why the less well-equipped sectors (not just geographical, bt also in terms of subject-matter) of the global economy will have a 'battle' f sorts on their hands... yet we must not simply acknowledge a global economy, it is what will dictate the norms we embrace in conversation and in business...

The comments in this piece point to what Global Entrepreneurship Week lacks. If you're wondering where the muddled comments come from they are the result of people who have signed up for the "make money by working at home" ads you see around the internet. The gullible are taught to make barely sensical comments on blogs and where possible include links -- and they collect a few pennies when someone clicks on the links. So in essence it is spammers duping "entrepreneurs" into doing their work for them.

The lesson here is that the problem isn't so much encouraging entrepreneurship as it is how we provide training and education to make entrepreneurs more successful (and protect the gullible from entrepreneurial scams). As Mr. Bishop notes we haven't made much progress there--birth and death rates of firms have stayed constant in most countries for years.

For those interested in understanding the entrepreneurship phenomena (and where more entrepreneurship matters and doesn't matter) I would recommend Scott Shane's book "The Illusions of Entrepreneurship" and the Global Entrepreneurship Monitoring project (esp. Zoltan Acs work on Necessity Entrepreneurs vs. Opportunity Entrepreneurs).

all businesses whether large or small need to be carried on with great efforts....
with the access to quality education, there is now a spate of innovative young people who like to foment new business as entrepreneurs. innovation has always been and will always be the key to success for such entrepreneurs....
there must be a fetish for success among young people who can actually spearhead the growth of their country..

I was astounded when I learnt that 99% of businesses in most developed countries are small or medium sized (SME), in fact it started a train of thought that became my own small business. For four years now I've been constantly amazed at the inspiration, tenacity, passion, ability, potential, creativity, that are in reality the bedrock of our nation. Unfortunately the support for not only individuals, but the entire entrpreneurial culture is poor, and I'm being very politely spoken in public.

More needs to be done to address the imbalance between at one end bailing out failing multi-national banks with billions of our money and the business support 'expert' that may return your call if you fit their (not the businesses) particular remit.

David Connor, Managing Director of Coethica

http://davidcoethica.wordpress.com

"zero boring government officials": 15 years ago, as a hopefully non-boring government economist, I helped to kick-start a successful venture called The Corporation Builders with entrepreneur David Millhouse. For many years, it had been widely claimed that there was a lack of venture and development capital in Australia, though a few of us thought that the lack was in ideas viable in the local context and in commercialisation skills. TCB put this to the test, bringing together those with capital and how-to skills with budding entrepreneurs. We provided intellectual input, the Queensland Treasury imprimatur and $A15,000 to get the ball rolling; otherwise, the venture was to live or die on its appeal to real-world entrepreneurs, without our ongoing involvement.

The head of Treasury could not understand this model compared to the usual approach of generating ongoing jobs for bureaucrats; he was much more sympathetic to our so-called Dept of State Development's plan to set up a unit with a $A1.5m annual budget to ape TCB. I attended a meeting between DSD staff and a representative of Australia's venture capitalists. She said repeatedly, the best thing that government could do was get out of the way, reduce impediments to new and expanding ventures. This message was unacceptable; each DSD officer put foward an idea which I knew to be stupid. Hopefully, this is not the case with the intiatives mentioned in your article

Wow!This is a great article.Hmmn.. i guess what you've said regarding above is very effective.

Regards,
Business Loans

"zero boring government officials": 15 years ago, as a hopefully non-boring government economist, I helped to kick-start a successful venture called The Corporation Builders with entrepreneur David Millhouse. For many years, it had been widely claimed that there was a lack of venture and development capital in Australia, though a few of us thought that the lack was in ideas viable in the local context and in commercialisation skills. TCB put this to the test, bringing together those with capital and how-to skills with budding entrepreneurs. We provided intellectual input, the Queensland Treasury imprimatur and $A15,000 to get the ball rolling; otherwise, the venture was to live or die on its appeal to real-world entrepreneurs, without our ongoing involvement.

The head of Treasury could not understand this model compared to the usual approach of generating ongoing jobs for bureaucrats; he was much more sympathetic to our so-called Dept of State Development's plan to set up a unit with a $A1.5m annual budget to ape TCB. I attended a meeting between DSD staff and a representative of Australia's venture capitalists. She said repeatedly, the best thing that government could do was get out of the way, reduce impediments to new and expanding ventures. This message was unacceptable; each DSD officer put foward an idea which I knew to be stupid. Hopefully, this is not the case with the intiatives mentioned in your article