2001 Conference - Rotorua

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Gordon McVie - Keynote Address

Enterprise: Building the Skills and Culture That Are Essential for Development in Your Region

>>Background Paper

Contents

• Introduction - Mr John Wright
• Introduction
• Living the Dream 1
• Living the Dream 2
• Culture before Structure
• Creating the Culture
• Isn't It Just Business Development by Another Name?
• Isn't It Possible to Make an Entrepreneur?
• New Ways
• Support Networks
• Enterprising/Entrepreneurial
• Prioritise
• Work Is Shifting
• Implications for Individuals
• Enterprise Shows
• Enterprise/Education
• Learning Pays
• Life-Long Learning
• It's Not Rocket Science
• Rekindling the Spirit
• Private Sector
• A New Zealand Example
• Scots Happenings
• Raising Aspirations
• Enterprise Insight
• Braveheart
• Take the Risk

Introduction - Mr John Wright

I have the pleasure and honour to be the Parliamentary Under Secretary to the Hon Jim Anderton, for Regional, Economic, and Business Development.

I have the pleasure of introducing Gordon McVie. Since 1994, Gordon has been responsible for the Scottish Enterprise Education Policy, and during that time he has become a leading international speaker in this field. He has addressed a wide range of audiences in Scotland and abroad, including briefing the Policy Unit of No 10 Downing Street, and co-hosting a conference on entrepreneurship in Berlin. In December last year Gordon was appointed Executive Director of Enterprise Insight Scotland, part of the national enterprise campaign launched by Prime Minister Tony Blair. He is a firm believer in the importance of developing a culture of enterprise and enterprising communities. His recent experience, of developing enterprising communities of Dumfries and Galloway in the wake of the foot and mouth crisis, shows that he has a depth of knowledge of bringing things up from the depths that we hope we in New Zealand never have to face. But I am sure that has given him some valuable experience that he will share with us today.

Regional Development New Zealand has a lot to do with rural development. Given today's international economy and the impact of international events, building enterprising and resilient communities is essential to our future. We need to be able to respond quickly to changes and circumstances. Gordon, I think will provide an international perspective on what we are doing in New Zealand.

Introduction

I would like to show you the kind of visible sort of approach to what I have been trying to do for the past seven years. And that is, when I look at a glass, what I see is a glass that is half full, not a glass that is half empty. I think that has become something of a metaphor for what we have been trying to do in Scotland in developing an enterprise culture. I have been listening to what has been happening in New Zealand, from Government right down to the local level, and I have this feeling of deja vu. Because I have heard exactly the same sentiments in Scotland for the past five, six, seven years.

We have too many people who only see the half-empty glass - and that includes on many occasions many sections of the media. That in itself is a kind of self-perpetuating situation, where people start to believe that things are really bleak, really bad, and "what can you do?" - this kind of resignation. On this, my third, visit to New Zealand, I have been amazed at the many parallels and similarities between our two countries. We are, after all, very small nations with large neighbours; we also need to compete in the global economy. We can't compete in value-add and creativity and all the others things that we have heard about, and that is something that I believe we have in common.

Whilst I come into your midst, there is no way that I am going to tell you how it can or should be done. I work on the basis that every trip is a learning journey, a learning journey for me in which I can share experiences, exchange ideas with others, because it is a two-way process. I would also like to illustrate the style that I am going to use today, because most people in making presentations - usually if it is a learned paper by academics - start at (a) and work their way sequentially and logically and arrive at (b). Well I start at (a) and end at (b) but I am not sure how I am going to get there. It is rather like taking some detours. There is a kind of structure in what I want to do, and we will look at some of the more strategic contexts for the topic before we go on to what I think is the real nitty gritty of all this.

Living the Dream 1

I am going to give you very simple examples. I am going to go back 20 years to the dreadful 80s. In 1980 a young man from Scotland called Allan Wells became the Olympic 100-metre champion and became within 1/10th of a second of becoming the 200-metre champion. Some Italian beat him. Allan Wells did not have the benefit of lottery funding, sponsorship or any of the support that is available today. He trained throughout the winter in Edinburgh - no southern hemisphere summer training for him - and he had a job as an engineer in a local factory.

Allan Wells had a dream and he was inspired by Eric Liddell; those of you who have seen Chariots of Fire know that story. Not by Harold Abrahams, who had won the 100 metres from his background at Oxford and a position of privilege, but by somebody with a much more ordinary and humble background who did not run in the 100 metres, as we know, but he ran in the 400 metres for the first time and won the gold medal in the Paris Olympics of 1924. And what that sums up for me is, that if the individual has the fire in their belly, if they have the dream, that irrespective of the circumstances they can go for it.

So sometimes having the best infrastructure and support is not going to turn you into a champion. And I think it is important that we encourage our young people particularly - but all of us need to dream dreams. We want to take that into the business context as well, because most young people who have dreams want to be sports stars or something like that but very few have a dream of wanting to be a global entrepreneur, which says a lot about our respective cultures.

Living the Dream 2

At the same time as Allan Wells in 1980 there was a father in a household in Perth, Scotland. He was made redundant from his job and his son and daughter persuaded him to part with some of his redundancy money to buy a bus, because they saw an opportunity. The daughter was a nurse and the son was an accountant. As it happened in the next two to three years, thanks to the de-regulation of the buses, they saw an opportunity that then became a dream. And that brother and sister - Ann Gloag and Brian Souter - founded the Stagecoach empire. The first thing I saw when I disembarked at Auckland Airport was a Stagecoach bus. And they grew a global company from a council house in Perth within 20 years. Again, they did not have the infrastructure or support that exists today in terms of the business advice, or the financial support and so on.

So what that illustrates is, that you can grow global companies without the structure and support that is available in many areas to say thank you. I think it is also important to realise that when we talk about lack of support we can always give examples of people who have done it in spite of it. That doesn't mean to say that we shouldn't provide support, and the premise for my presentation today is about creating enterprising communities - culture before structure.

Culture before Structure

I have to be upfront at the beginning and say that I favour the culture. It doesn't mean to say that we are not mutually exclusive, but I think if we don't have the culture no amount of structure or infrastructure is going to deliver it for you.

Global company Nokia is an example of a company that grew from a population not much more than Scotland. Not many people realise that Nokia's original business was a paper mill. A paper mill that made toilet paper, so it is quite a leap from toilet rolls to mobile phones. So what it illustrates is that there are opportunities for people if they see them to be able to do something about it. Nokia's benefit to the whole Finnish economy, and indeed that community, has been very well documented.

Creating the Culture

So what we have is: creating the culture - the spirit of enterprise that hopefully we need - one or two to do that, and then they actually become established as role models for others to aspire to. When we talk about a community I feel that there are two types of community, there is the physical geographical community which is mostly what we are talking about, but there is also the other community - the business community and the education community. They are both equally valid in terms of how we use the word, because we need to develop these communities of interest as much as the physical communities.

What we have found out in Scotland (as a result of the business birth rate strategy and campaign that ran for about seven years before we had an independent evaluation) is what we were doing well and what we were doing not so well.

This illustrates the point. Basically Scotland is a small business economy. We have 300,000 businesses and 98% of them are small. So what that means is everything has to be geared towards that. But by and large we need to replenish the stock of small businesses every year to the tune of about 20,000. There is a net and gross element in that. But basically what we have said is that the enterprise economy comes out of that, and what we are finding is that there are about 750,000 people in Scotland who are interested in starting and running their own business. But if you look down the funnel, what happens is that only one adult in 50 actually does anything about the planning and only 23,000 become SMEs. If you look at the survival rates we end up with only 33 that actually grow to 50+ employees. What matters is how many, further down the pipeline, are turned into real business starts, and then establish growth.

But enterprise economy is tied up with attitudes to entrepreneurs, interest in entrepreneurship, and indeed enterprise education. We often get asked, "isn't entrepreneurship just business development by another name?"

Isn't It Just Business Development by Another Name?

• Entrepreneurship is about innovation - about doing things differently
• It is opportunity driven
• New markets, New technologies, New methods
• Business development is about the right way
• Entrepreneurship is about a new way
• With entrepreneurship, style is as important as content

Isn't It Possible to Make an Entrepreneur?

• An entrepreneur is something you become
• The entrepreneur and the business are changed by the action
• It's all about learning
• The key is to take action

New Ways

But we have said that entrepreneurship is about innovation, it is about doing things differently. It is opportunity driven, it is about new markets, new technologies, new methods. Business development tends to be about the right way to do things, entrepreneurship is about a new way, and with entrepreneurship it is about style, which is as important as content. And the old chestnut of course, that we find: isn't it impossible to make an entrepreneur? Because it is the nurture versus nature thing.

What we say is that everyone has the capability of being more entrepreneurial, more enterprising, and what we have said here is that an entrepreneur is something that you become, the entrepreneur and the business are changed by the process. It is all about learning. The key is to take action, and this is the learning theme that I will get back to.

What is really interesting is, when we start to look at it, you can get bogged down with a lot of the functionality, which is to do with the structure and infrastructure, but as you see there is much more to it than that. And it comes back to the human element as well.

This is what we call the iceberg, 8/9ths below the surface, at the top you get the advice, money, property and training - these are the visibles. These are the things that we understand, the things that for many of the business support agencies is their raison d'etre. But underneath the surface we have got things like confidence, support, drive, commitment, knowledge, skills, ideas, motivation and resource.

It is these kinds of areas that the culture we are trying to develop is there to support. And I think that is something that we can hopefully consider when we take the culture versus structure argument.

When it comes to supporting entrepreneurs we have two models. We have the traditional model of picking winners. We often heard this, "we would take good ideas and back winners", but that is in direct contrast to the "letting a thousand flowers bloom" approach.

Let me give you one example. Those of you who have been to the States have heard of Wal-Mart. What is not generally known is that for 30 years Wal-Mart's turnover was less than two million dollars. But it took the drive of one man, Sam Walton, to take it from that up to the next level, within ten years, to the biggest employer in the US. The growth of businesses globally with fast-growing companies, it was an 11 million net job, the same as the number of jobs in the US. It is interesting to see where that's come from. Very few in high tech, but a lot of them at Wal-Mart were using the technology, and I think that is significant as well.

If you look at the "Traditional method" list again we have experience, one-to-one, counselling, hands on, planning, strategic and the right way. And the new model in the opposite list about self help, learning, entrepreneurship, networking, mentoring, facilitating, innovative and a business model.

Support Networks

When we look at what happens in terms of the support networks, we have seen a growth in the number of entrepreneurs, particularly high-profile entrepreneurs who are very keen to put something back. In Scotland we actually had an entrepreneurial exchange of some of the main players, and that was to promote entrepreneurship to the wider community and to act as a networking and support organisation, and they held a host of events.

You can imagine if you are a young entrepreneur with a start-up, you're bootstrapping rather than earning any great income, and you go to an event and turn round and you are talking to a guy who has just sold his business for 260 million. They do a lot of good work in supporting up-and-coming entrepreneurs. We also produced a publication called Local Heroes which was to take companies that had been in existence for at least two years and no more than ten, with a turnover of a certain limit, to categorise them. There was a website as well. That demonstrated the turnover was 1.8 billion and employed many thousands of people, indicating how significant a sector of the economy it was. I think it was important that we actually recognised the contribution that these companies made in their local communities, and they were always very happy as our purpose was to support the activity.

Enterprising/Entrepreneurial

Every publication that comes out from government on economic development is actually laced with the word enterprising or entrepreneurial. Your Prime Minister's speech was so similar to the preamble to the document that our Minister for Enterprise and Lifelong Learning published as guidance to the enterprise networks. You can probably just take the word Scotland and substitute New Zealand (or a country on a similar basis) for it, but what she said was our economic success depends on the people of Scotland (wherever you live) - their creativity and enterprise. Too often in the past the lack of self-belief has held us back, and economic change has needlessly become social misery. We believe that a strong economy and a strong society can be two sides of the same coin. Enterprise and wealth creation can lie at the heart of reviving communities with the social economy and the third sector also playing key roles, but this requires individuals willing to learn and relearn, for businesses to be smart, and government to listen and learn. We can create a dynamic enterprising economy where opportunity is extended to all and no-one is left out. Our task is to create the conditions for a smart successful Scotland. I don't think that many people here would disagree with that. And I think it is a sentiment that would be shared for New Zealand.

Prioritise

In the three key areas of growing businesses, global connections and learning and skills, the number one priority is greater entrepreneurial dynamism and creativity. We recognise - and the literature is pretty copious now - that there is a significant body of knowledge saying that you can be an entrepreneur even though you are not self-employed.

You could be a corporate entrepreneur or a social entrepreneur, and we need to encourage that within organisations. So there is this tension in the employer - what happens if somebody comes up with a smart idea, they might run away with it!

The Yellow Post-It is an example of entrepreneurship with Art Fry. I bet he wished he invented it himself. It would have made him very rich. There are several examples of that in many parts of the world. So what we are recognising is that entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial spirit can actually be fostered and found in many areas indeed. And that is something that we have to explain to many of the young people. Because the impact of developing an enterprise culture, and particularly with Enterprise Education - it may not necessarily be felt in the short term and increased business start-up, but hopefully it will be felt in the labour market with more employable young people.

Work Is Shifting

Implications for Individuals

• Employability?
• More flexibility = more instability
• Life-long learning
• New roles, e.g. teacher as a guide, not instructor
• Polarisation of unskilled and knowledge workers?

Employability is the buzzword at the moment. We have heard that security of employment has gone the same way as the dodo. But security of employability is something that is attainable for those people who want to go for it in this fast-changing global and increasingly knowledge-based economy.

We have been changing the culture that has been the mainstay of our developing the enterprise culture in Scotland. There were more or less three key elements within that. The first one was for the general public. We had a series of personal enterprise shows held in the main centres of population, but in all parts of Scotland for two days where the general public could pre-register, there was lots of advertising in the media - including television.

Enterprise Shows

People came to the first round out of curiosity. 14,000 people turned up at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre in Glasgow on an October weekend. They hoovered up all the brochures, so the people who really wanted them found they did not have any. But they had a notion that they did not want to be talking to suits (this is my first reference to bankers today). They got Pringle Sweaters for the suits, but it still made them look like suits. But eventually we got them to use more entrepreneurs and we had the ideas zone, the information, and seminars running, and ways in which they could follow it up. We are getting more sophisticated and the numbers are not as big, and the people who are coming are more interested. But the statistics between 1996 and 2001 are quite interesting. Because 40,000 people in total have visited these Enterprise Shows across Scotland and it has resulted in 8,000 start-ups and 14,000 new jobs. That is a reasonable return. You can measure it out per job, which is the normal out-measuring framework approach.

The other main element we have tinkered with was the Business Shop Network which has now become consolidated into the Small Business Gateway - a one-door approach for business advice and information for start-up business growth and high growth. It is all web-enabled too. In the past year since we went for that single brand the number of enquires through the help-line, and people dropping in, increased by about 50%. I am not sure of the exact statistics but it is significant and it was based on the idea that people who have an idea know where they can go to. It is quite interesting that a piece of research that was carried out in one of our local areas asked people where the best place to go for business advice would be, and the number of people who didn't know to go anywhere was actually alarmingly high in spite of the information. So it shows you, you can give people all the information you like but if they are not seeing it or listening or taking it in, it can be counter-productive. But that has actually made a significant difference.

Enterprise/Education

The other key element is the whole aspect of increasing the contribution of education to the development of entrepreneurship. The business birth rate review found that this had been one of the most successful. Although they are not measuring business start-up, they were measuring attitudes and they were measuring the number of young people right through the education system - primary schools, colleges and universities - who were having an enterprise experience. It further recommended that the long-term provision of entrepreneurs through education should continue. But I don't see it being solely within the formal education system, I see it as in the wider community as well.

We won't call it enterprise education, it is about introducing people to enterprise, never mind education. We have tended to drop "education" from a lot of things, because people are often turned off by the word education. What we are trying to do is turn them on to learning. There is a significant semantic difference in the two terms. It is always very difficult to measure changes in attitude (which is a prerequisite to developing enterprise culture), one in which a positive "can do" attitude approach should be the norm for all of our young people, with the consequent improvement in their employability. That is something we are striving towards and I will try and illustrate how we are doing that in one specific area.

I mentioned earlier on about the whole idea of skills and learning. One of the difficulties is - and I don't suppose it will be terribly different in New Zealand - labour market intelligence about what skills are needed. Traditionally there has been a time lag and that is when the employers claim that they are not getting the skills that they need. There is a bit of an irony here, that one of our electronics companies in Scotland, Sun Microsystems, has been moaning about the lack of skills in areas for some time and they recently announced 600 lay-offs. So the question was "what have you been doing to upskill the people that were in your company?" and I will look at the responsibility for skilling and learning shortly.

Learning Pays

There is this myth that entrepreneurs don't fit the model that we have in education, and have for years, where it assumes a common learning style. We are now recognising that there is such a thing as an individual learning style - it is difficult for the system to cope when there are 30 kids in the class and all the rest of it. What it has demonstrated is that leading entrepreneurs are very quick learners. In fact some of them are just-in-time learners. They learn because they have to and it is the most immediate need that they have, and it is the conventional method that you acquire knowledge that you might be able to apply somewhere. It has been demonstrated in bodies of research that learning pays, and entrepreneurs have been shown to learn particularly effectively.

We have a kind of High Priest class within Scottish Enterprise, and they are the people who look at trends - I think they used to be called Strategic Futures. They would try and read the runes and see what was going to happen with the future. And this ties in with the knowledge economy. Just to illustrate where this comes from: if you look at the pattern of work and how it is shifting, and has shifted, from the old model to the new; we have moved from the manual to the intellectual, the routine to the non-routine, manufacturing to services, full time to part time, jobs for life to portfolio work, from the employer focus to the customer focus and from the local to the global. We will still have a lot of the other jobs that exist and you will see what happens in terms of the skills. Because it has implications for the individual. And what are they? Employability - more flexibility can mean more instability.

Life-Long Learning

Did any of you see the news about the Millennium Dome that we had in the UK? On 2 January 2000, the BBC News put a reporter down to interview the first visitors to the Millennium Dome and the first person who came out was asked, "What do you think of the Dome for how many pounds it cost?" It was an Essex man (a sociological type): "it was all right, it was quite interesting, but it was very educational, I stopped learning when I left school".

I think in that one instant it summed up the whole national attitude towards learning. People thought you reached a point and you stopped, and what we are trying to do is get this whole notion that learning is for life. In my view learning and enterprise are indivisible. The new roles that we will have - and we can already see this with the technology, the whole idea of a teacher being the fountain of all knowledge as happened in the past has all changed. You are looking at navigator, guide but not instructor. The one that perhaps poses most threat, is the polarisation that could exist between the unskilled and the knowledge workers. You have probably seen a percentage of a car that is knowledge-based, that has come from the knowledge inside people's heads, and that's happening in most areas today. So here is an example of how we see the world of work shifting and the implications for individuals.

The two diagrams are broadly similar in terms of employability, the knowledge economy and the new business models, the impact on people.

It's Not Rocket Science

There are key skills and core attributes, and I wanted to have a conceptual framework, a schematic that would summarise for me what these core skills for the knowledge age actually were. Basically, as a geographer, this is modelled on the earth's structure, with the core, the inner core and the mantle. I saw the inner core as being the soft core skills of creativity, problem solving, interpersonal skills, communicating flexibility and capacity to learn. The outer core has what are normally known as the core skills - the team-working, numeracy, using IT and literacy. On the earth's crust you see the technical and vocational skills that are learned in the workplace on the job.

Quite often you get employers who bemoan the lack of skills and at the same time say, "give me the right person with the right attitude and right attributes and we will then overlay that with the technical and vocational skills". If you look in the atmosphere out there beyond the earth's crust I put down some of the key elements. Life-long learning, employability, entrepreneurship and one that I think is probably the most important of all - attitude is everything.

When we are developing our enterprising communities that's something we have to emphasise the whole time. I think we are developing that positive "can-do" attitude, irrespective of where you come from or indeed where you are going to. That basically is the strategic background, and I don't think there is anything there that is exactly rocket science, but what I would like to do is try and demonstrate in practical terms how this can be translated at the grass-roots level.

Rekindling the Spirit

Many of you will be aware of the foot and mouth epidemic in the UK. And 97% of the Scottish cases were reported in Dumfries and Galloway. The crisis was both an economic and a human tragedy. Although it has very serious implications, I am only too acutely aware that it would be almost impossible to contemplate the equivalent impact on a place like New Zealand. Because I have seen it in a specific area, I understand the nervousness in other parts of the world that something like that might ever happen there. But interestingly enough, it is the communities in Dumfries and Galloway that have rallied round the policy of containment and eradication. What has happened is that with most crises the response of the people involved has been what has provided hope and, in this case, the vehicle for recovery. The economic statistics are pretty bad but it is the human element that is actually the hardest to bear and can't be understated. Irrespective of anything else it was an appalling crisis and tragedy for everyone who was effected by it.

What has happened in Dumfries and Galloway is that they more or less had to look at the economy and where it was and its impact, and say, how do we get the plan for recovery? There are some fairly obvious things that needed to be done. But one of the interesting points in terms of agriculture and rural development, businesses, tourism (a key sector), was in terms of people in communities - it was quite clear that as a priority area it was to support a local approach to economic and community regeneration. That was where I was brought it as part of the recovery plan, to develop a project called "Creating Enterprising Communities". As part of the recovery plan following this epidemic it stated that there was an urgent need to take immediate action to create or rekindle the spirit of enterprise in the region across all sections in the community. What we had was allocation of resources to increase the activity that was currently going on and to plug gaps and develop new approaches that were currently deficient.

Private Sector

I mentioned that the private sector, particularly through the entrepreneurial exchange, was a keen supporter of what it was we were trying to do. About two years ago there was a major conference of an organisation called "Scotland International" who have a topic each year at Gleneagles Hotel. The programme had the name of a company that was going to do a presentation, and instead of being some people in suits who came in, it was a teacher and three pupils from a village called Muirkirk - a community that had the highest male unemployment in Scotland, rural and ex-coal mining and more or less on its knees.

This teacher had got the youngsters, with the help of the local community and the local businesses, to manufacture tartan wallets for export to their partner school in the US. Later on they had the millennium wallet in a different tartan and they actually doubled the price because they realised they had under-priced it - there are not many products you can double the price and the demand goes up. They defied the laws of supply and demand. That teacher came in with the three pupils, and Scotland's leading business magazine carried a photo on the front page, it had: "Leanne Hamilton, age 11, Scotland's youngest CEO". The story was all about this school and enterprise, and the teacher said it benefited not only the class but the whole school. Even the school bully's behaviour had changed. I am not sure how, but never mind, it did have these kind of impacts. The private sector guys there said, at the invitation of one of our leading entrepreneurs, what can we do to have this experience across the whole of Scotland? They put their hands in the air and wrote the cheques, and two months ago the Minister launched the School Enterprise Programme for Primaries, a ₤5 million over three years, ₤2.5 million from the private sector, ₤2.5 million from the Government, and it will give every young person in Scotland within these three years at lease two enterprise experiences by the time they leave primary school. That is far greater that we ever could have dreamt of.

A New Zealand Example

When over here in July, I visited Caldwell Primary School in Auckland and watched the PrEP Programme, the Primary Enterprise Programme in New Zealand, and I thought: we are doing a lot. What can I see that adds value to what we are doing? Our programme is class affairs, but what I saw there was a whole school approach to enterprise, based on a micro in a mini society, where they have their own currency. This button that pressed for me was "citizenship", which is a major concern within Scotland, but how do we teach citizenship, enterprise with citizenship?

So doing the deal as I do - I don't deal with organisations, I deal with people - Ken Baker, of Enterprise New Zealand Trust, and I sat down and the result was that the trainer for PrEP came over to Dumfries and Galloway in October and trained up 14 of our teachers who are going to deliver that programme over the next year. In return, because we did a deal, we have a programme that Ken hopefully will be able to bring into New Zealand, and I have already spoken to people about that at Venture Taranaki and Northland Grow. That is how small countries do it, we can exchange things, we don't need to worry about going into the marketplace, we are back to the oldest form of trade and that is bartering, changing over one product for another.

Scots Happenings

We have got a whole range of things in Dumfries and Galloway. The programme that I was talking about is called Get Into Enterprise which is a pre-start-up programme that is now on-line, and it has been so successful that we have trained about 1500 tutors, and the number of clients is now about 10,000. Originally it was designed for social inclusion areas - that's for the people that are the dis-generation: the disaffected, disappointed, disengaged, sometimes they disappeared, the disenfranchised. You can't afford to neglect that group of people for purely economic terms. And what we have been trying to do is take the pre-start Enterprise Programme. Even though it just maybe improves employability, it is also about improving self-esteem, self confidence, and giving people hands-on at trying mini-enterprise as a social trader or partnership. It is the skills that they learn from that.

Some of the universities are using it as a kind of pre-university activity. We struck that almost by accident, but it shows you that in terms of enterprise, if you recognise and identify opportunities sometimes they can pay rich dividends. The local college in Dumfries and Galloway will become the e-learning centre for getting into enterprise.

So for people who live in remote areas - remote in Scotland means one hour from the nearest town of 50,000 - what we are going to be able to do is go into the local areas and get them interested in the programme. The tutorial support will be delivered by the college tutors. Dumfries and Galloway is about 100 miles by 50 miles in area so it is a reasonably-sized area for Scotland. That is something that hopefully we are going to build on and roll across Scotland.

Raising Aspirations

Raising aspirations is a key element of developing enterprise culture. Two weeks ago one of our leading motivational speakers went on the road and went into three local communities and ran a series of three motivational workshops in schools, the college, the village hall - anywhere where there were a group of people. As a result of that we have signed up about 88 people for the Enterprise Programme. That is just one output.

What it also demonstrates is that in some of these communities the people have been believing that the economy has collapsed and there are no opportunities, and once people get into that downward spiral, it is very difficult to get out of. The guy known as Watt Nicoll has worked with all the top sports people, he tells a story, for those of you who know a bit about soccer, about David Beckham. His father had a piece of paper that was written when he was ten years old in primary school and he has got it framed in his house. It was: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" There were three things he wanted to be - a professional footballer, captain England and marry a pop star. It's the difference between the people who have a dream and the people who settle for mediocrity. And I think that is where enterprise has a role to play in that.

Enterprise Insight

There are quite a few examples of things that have been tried and hopefully are going to reap the rewards. Last year Prime Minister Tony Blair launched a National Enterprise Campaign in the UK called Enterprise Insight, about developing a more enterprising Britain. We had actually been further down the line than many regions of the UK. So we tartan-ised it, as we do, and basically it is about encouraging Youth Enterprise, aged 5-30, knowledge awareness and understanding of entrepreneurship and encouraging self-employment as a positive career option at some stage. What we have decided to do in Scotland is to run a series of Youth Enterprise Showcases - twelve of them right across Scotland. What we are doing is through the British Chambers of Commerce - Scottish Chambers in our case. The Institute of Directors and the Confederation of British Industry were having 500-1000 young people taking part in all sort of things, including enterprise challenges and even just engaging with businesses. We are getting about 50 new business people at a time coming to the event and all wanting to sign up, because there is a huge resource out there in the business community that we need to tap into, to help us develop this enterprise culture. I defy you to say "no", if you are a business person, to primary kids taking part in an Enterprise Challenge.

Braveheart

We call the Enterprise Challenges "Braveheart" for obvious reasons. Basically, it shows how we work with people. We had run this challenge two or three times before, and it was while I was in Dunedin two years ago sitting in the Chambers of Commerce Office that we decided we would run a challenge in Edinburgh and Dunedin in real time by videolink. I was in an 850 Conference in Edinburgh and I will tell you there is nothing more scary going live 12,000 miles away and running exactly the same challenge. And this shows you how enterprise works. Because a guy came up to me and gave me his business card while I was in the middle of doing this live link and he said, I am from Australia and I would like to talk to you. I did not really pay a lot of attention but kept his business card. A few weeks later I had an e-mail from Ken Baker saying this guy from Australia was at the conference and said it was really good. Wouldn't it be a good idea if we could manage a three-way link and include Australia? So that is where the Enterprise Olympics were born. Next June we are going to be running the Enterprise Olympics and we will be the host nation in Scotland but all other countries will stay in their own country. We have managed to get Stewart Trundle of Venture Taranaki to put his hand up to host the event in New Plymouth, and there will be maybe 10-12 teams of eight high school kids all doing the same by national challenge, the same challenge as everyone else, and each winner will then go into the Olympic final to be judged by NASA at the Johnston Space Centre. We are hoping to get a high profile VIP, maybe a royal connection, to perform the opening ceremony in Glasgow and we will use web technology to link it all together.

Take the Risk

It all came about from two people saying "wouldn't if be a good idea if?" I think that sums up what we mean by the spirit of enterprise. What's needed is more people to be able to think and do things like that. Very high risk indeed, and I always hide behind the get-out clause, "If you do something really high risk and it comes off well that was great, if it doesn't you say, but that is my job anyway", because that is your justification for doing it.

Over the past seven years we have seen the development of a sophisticated infrastructure in Scotland. If I could give you an analogy, it is rather like lots of people have one piece of the jigsaw, and what we have in front of us in the jigsaw lid, we don't own the jigsaw lid, but actually we all have a part of it, and that is where the communities and the partnership all come in. Because creating enterprising communities requires a sustained effort and a multi-agency approach. The seeds of enterprise have to be sown at the earliest possible age and nurtured for each stage in an individual's development.

I would just like to conclude with one example. Professor Robert Goddard, who is the father of rocket science, predicted human space life at the beginning of the 20th century. The New York Times in 1921 ran a leader which said "Professor Goddard does not have a basic grasp of elementary physics that is ladled out daily in our high schools," to which he replied: "Who is to say what is impossible, for it is the dreams of yesterday that are the hopes of today that become the realities of tomorrow". And in 1969 on 21 July the New York Times published an official apology to Professor Goddard. Unfortunately he was dead and buried by that time, but I hope that you take the point because you have to have dreams, and that is what I think is a large part of developing an enterprise culture.

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