Compliance Rules, OK!

It’s National Enterprise Week in the UK. Our next Prime Minister Gordon Brown is launching Enterprise Summer Schools to train British 14- to 16-year-olds to become “the next generation of British entrepreneurs.” Instead of the usual long summer holiday, these lucky students will get the chance to go through training modules on innovation, enterprise, decision-making, problem-solving, management, and leadership; a sort of Re-imagine Boot Camp!

Shame that these young entrepreneurs will all too often be growing up in an education system that models the opposite: order, regulation, standardised curricula, hierarchy, etc., and then pass on to work where their bosses will talk a good game on innovation and entrepreneurship, but run regimes where “Compliance rules, OK!”

The big question is what is it going to take to disrupt this pattern and give our budding entrepreneurs a real chance to blossom? Much more than today’s “creativity summit” in London, where Mr Brown and 200 specially invited business leaders will discuss how creativity and innovation can boost British business. Better they spend their time together talking about how they systematically suppress any sign of entrepreneurship! I wish.

Richard King posted this on November 17, 2005, in Education.