Improving Mentality

Alongside research, campaigns, events and updating businesses on how policy changes impact businesses, we aim to make the case for entrepreneurs’ contributions to society.

While we can count our media hits, that doesn’t seem like it’s measuring the right thing. But just because something is hard to measure doesn’t mean it’s not important. In fact, making the positive case for entrepreneurship may be one of the most important things we do.

Our Head of Innovation Research unpacks this challenge in his latest newsletter. Anton Howes’s expertise is in the Industrial Revolution and how it happened, and why it started in Britain. His key insight is that ideas, people and connections matter more than many historians of the period assume. People became inventors because they were exposed to and inspired by other inventors – it was the spread of an “improving mentality”. Anton’s insight is that necessity isn’t the mother of invention; this improving mentality is. And what was true of the Industrial Revolution is true today.

I used to be a journalist and edited a weekly page on entrepreneurship, interviewing some of the UK’s leading entrepreneurs. Without that exposure to entrepreneurs I doubt I would have ever founded The Entrepreneurs Network. One day sticks in my mind, when I went out for drinks with a group of entrepreneurs after interviewing one of them. It was perhaps the first time that I had been in a large group of just entrepreneurs (apart from me at the time). I was used to being around friends complaining about their jobs. Instead, I was bombarded with positivity and creativity. It was infectious.

So how do we go about making the case for a more entrepreneurial society? One small contribution I’m making this year is to get back into writing more about inspirational stories, undertaking interviews with entrepreneurs and inviting our Supporters and Advisers to sit in on the calls to ask their own questions. The first was with Shamil Thakrar, the co-founder of Dishoom and I’ll share his insights in an article here next week.

Anton thinks films could play an important role in inspiring the next generation of inventors (and has crowdsourced a list here), while Alex Tabarrok suggests business owners can learn a lot from The Profit, a reality-TV show on CNBC. I also like Robin Hanson’s suggestion that we record the lives of successful managers to train the next generation. He thinks compressing the recordings, identifying key decisions and asking viewers to make their own choices (before seeing the actual choices) would be instructive.

We have undertaken a lot of work on entrepreneurship education to suggest how schools, colleges and universities can imbed enterprise education in their teaching, but inspirational interventions can happen at any time. That’s why we are thinking more broadly about how we can influence society so more people are inspired by the power of entrepreneurship to make the world a better place. We are in the process of scoping out a report on this, but if you have any insights or want to support this work, drop Anton an email.

Fixing Copyright

Following last week’s launch of our report on Fixing Copyright, the King’s Intellectual Property (IP) Legal Clinic got in touch as they provide free IP advice to small traders, entrepreneurs, start-ups and organisations on matters relating to copyright, patents, trademarks and designs, as well as procedures and forms for registration of IP rights, their protection and enforcement, among others.

At the IP Clinic, law students work on cases under the supervision of qualified lawyers from leading IP law firms to provide free legal advice by interviewing clients and researching the legal issues involved. Clients are then sent a written letter of advice, normally within two weeks of the initial interview.

This is the first time we’ve recommended them, so if you get advice it would be great if you could let me know how it goes. Find out more here and get in touch with them here.

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