This is Global Entrepreneurship Week and to mark its start, I volunteered at the first day of Chain Reaction an event which saw 700 people gather to explore how entrepreneurship can be a source of social good.
There was a variety of inspirational speakers including Tim Smit of the Eden Project, Sophi Tranchell of Divine Chocolate, and Eugenie Harvey of We Are What We Do. My greatest surprise of the day was the closing remarks made by Prime Minister Gordon Brown. His focus was on the economy but not the all-too-familiar message of "this is just a downturn, we'll be back to big, strong, lean and mean again soon" of which many politicians and business people are trying to persuade us. Instead, he acknowledged the economic crisis as one and the same as our resource crisis, emphasised the 'climate change imperative' and urged the importance of investing in renewable energy and agriculture. He described these times as experiencing the birth pangs intrinsic to us becoming a global community and as such that they alert us to the need for transition phases.
In many ways, the general thrust of the day was similar to the approach taken by Rob Hopkins, instigator of the Transition Movement that we are entering transition years and that the innovation, ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit which got us in to this situation can now be re-harnessed and directed towards finding solutions to the world's needs.
As I left the conference and spotted in the newspaper that more City jobs are being cut, I had a vision of those thousands of people moving not from employment to unemployment, but to enterprise. A move away from complacent expectation that someone else will employ us as a cog in some wheel.... to a belief that we can have great ideas, gather with others to turn them into reality, and effect social change through doing so.
It feels like time to get excited. There's the sense of a new model of business emerging. It's not the old way where business is set up purely for the sake of profit with the directors perhaps developing a conscience later in life, creating philanthropic foundations to offset the damage their enterprise has done. The new model is that enterprise itself is a vehicle for answering society's needs.
The win-win-win nature of this transaction continually inspires me. I spoke to two women at the conference who were feeling increasingly frustrated as the day went on. They were hearing about all these inspirational projects yet feeling that their own gifts were being wasted, their potential not fulfilled. I hear this so frequently when interviewing women for my Inspirational 100 project - the pain of that gap between what you could be doing, and what you are doing. One of the women started crying as she told me that in her previous decade of working life she felt that she had added no value. She knew that she could give, and that she WAS, more than that. It reiterated to me this great human need for personal fulfilment through fulfilling our own potential - and that one way of doing this is by fulfilling a need in the world through enterprise.
Do Things Differently
1) Inquiry: What is the most entrepreneurial thing I have ever done? What was it like to match my strengths/interests with a need in the world?
2) Inquiry: If starting a business were the only way to effect social change, what need would I want to meet and how could a business model serve that need?
3) If there were no time to waste and you were really needed right now, what would be your next action step? Get whatever support you need to make it.
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