If I were to say the word ‘entrepreneur’ to you, you would probably think Elon Musk or Bill Gates or Richard Branson – or somebody else who has spotted a gap in a market, set up a business to exploit it, and made extraordinary amounts of money.
You may not think immediately of an Irish lady called Maureen Forrest, who set up the charity called Hope that I spoke about a few weeks ago, providing education for slum children in Kolkata, working for free for the last 15 years, or our own Mr Everitt, who saw that we did little formal leadership education at school and brought two explicit leadership courses into the Lower Sixth, or the boy at school who, for his DT a-Level project, designed and made a snooker cue to be used by people in wheelchairs and, when he had finished it, gave it to somebody at his local old people’s home. Yet these three were certainly acting in an entrepreneurial way. They, too, had come up with an idea, something for which there was a need, and had had the drive to do something about it.
There are lots of available definitions for entrepreneurship. Here are a couple:
An individual’s ability to turn ideas into action. It includes creativity, innovation and risk-taking, as well as the ability to plan and manage projects in order to achieve objectives.
EU Skills Panorama
Pursuing opportunities without regard to the resources we currently control.
Stevenson and Jarillo
I like the first one – it is simply understood – but that second one is also interesting: the idea that you see an opportunity, don’t yet have the resources to be able to exploit it, but set about trying to find ways to do so anyway.
We in the management team at school, along with Mr Everitt as an entrepreneurial lead, and various Old Bedfordians and current parents, have been thinking a lot recently about how we can try to teach and encourage entrepreneurial behaviour a little more explicitly at school here. The fact is that most of you will need to be a bit entrepreneurial at some stage in your lives, and that need not be quite as frightening as it sounds. People these days have plenty of opportunity to be creative, not least with access to the internet; they also have a lot more need to be so, as careers take more turns than they ever they used to. It is more likely these days that people will need to find interesting ways to recreate their own careers. For some, this is exciting, for others frightening – but in fact you are all already being taught many of the skills you need to do just this.
So, what might entrepreneurship mean in a Bedford School sense? A school which promotes five core values of living, the expectation to help one another and society around us, as well as, in its own mission, “to teach boys to think intelligently, act wisely and be fully engaged in a challenging and changing world”? Well, we think something like the following…
Working together to bring our creative ideas to life for the betterment of society.
Bedford School
That is what Bill Gates did – undoubtedly, he did not work alone; he was creative, he acted and created something which has advanced the human experience; but it is also what that boy in DT did. He worked with his teachers, and with some advice from outside school, to create something which helped society – though in his case, a single lucky person, but with potential for more.
“Working together to bring our creative ideas to life for the betterment of society” is also achievable by all of us; it is not a frightening concept and yet it is undeniably entrepreneurial. All of us can do this, and, indeed, many of us already have. A number of you in this room have, for instance, set up an extra-curricular club or society – you probably do not think of yourself as an entrepreneur, but your actions fit every one of those entrepreneurial descriptions I have shown you. You have seen a gap in the market and set about exploiting it. Some of you have done so successfully – you have a club which meets weekly, has a core membership (however small or niche) and welcomes guest speakers to the school; others have not done so very successfully and will learn from the experience to do better in the future. All entrepreneurship very much embraces failure as a necessary, and indeed hugely worthwhile, process for future success. You nearly always take a risk to be entrepreneurial; but encouraging you – and, by the way, you all encourage one other – to give something a go, and to embrace and learn from failure in a good way, not to be afraid of it, is so important towards your learning and growing.
So, part of creating an entrepreneurial atmosphere at school in a safe way is to know that, if you enter a venture with integrity and determination, others will pat you on the back, whatever the result – giving something a go is far better than not doing so, and we all need to celebrate that.
Do look out for opportunities in the coming months and years. Many of the attributes needed for entrepreneurship are already taught here in various areas of school life – things like creativity, determination, teamwork, values, self-awareness and so on – and we are aiming over the next year or two to plug a few gaps. I recommend highly the Ivy House Award in the Lower Sixth – it is excellent – and we also have an entrepreneurship society, which anybody can attend, a Head Master’s Speech Day Prize (with money attached!) for social entrepreneurship, and are building a fund for budding entrepreneurs to be able to access. Mr Everitt is the lead on this, but I am also keen on it, and Mr Maltby is in charge of the fund.
Finally, Mr Everitt and I would love to hear from anybody who feels they are being entrepreneurial at the moment – we would love to be able to support you in any way we can, so do please simply step forward and let us know, by email or in person. It takes a bit of bravery to do so – but then again, risk can often bring reward, as even the most modest entrepreneurs know best.