British Council organizes enterprise summit
Chair for Enterprise Educators UK (the UK national network for
enterprise educators) and Southampton Business School, Southampton
Solent University, Director Dr. Simon Brown was in Sri Lanka recently to
speak on enterprise education at an enterprise summit organized by the
British Council.
Enterprise education is now increasingly being hailed as a legitimate
tool for wealth creation for a nation's economy; where its aim is to
develop in individuals (particularly the young) a set of skills and
attitudes that will allow them to be both job creators and highly
employable individuals, and help them contribute to the economy through
innovative value and knowledge creation. While it is vital that
universities play a key role by developing Enterprise Education into
their curriculums, support from corporates is increasingly being looked
at as a means of sustaining it via guidance, support, financial aid,
internships, and more.
Dr. Brown said that while it was generally accepted as important,
there was still a lot more work to be done, "A number of institutions
are focusing tremendously on it. But we still have to build the capacity
of teachers that can, and are willing, to teach enterprise education;
lots of teachers are good at teaching their subject, but not good at
building entrepreneurial, or enterprising, mindsets around innovation,
creativity, decision making and problem solving." Strongly emphasizing
that they still needed to get students today to learn to incorporate
life long learning in their professional lives so they continually
update and develop themselves, he said "My favourite quote is by one
academic called Hawkins, who said 'To be employed is to be at risk. To
be employable is to be secure'. Likewise, our goal is to build more
secure employees."
Looking at the challenges in sustaining enterprise education in Sri
Lanka, Dr. Brown said, "In Sri Lanka, there are only 14 or 15 or so
universities. Out of the 120,000 students sitting for their A/L's each
year, only 20,000 can be accepted into these universities. But while
these kids are very intelligent - in fact, the brightest of the bright -
most of them don't have the mindset to be innovators. They are not risk
takers and don't have creative ambition - they are more concerned with
theory and giving the right answer to a question "
Acknowledging that space cannot always be made in a curriculum for
enterprise education, Dr. Brown maintained there were other alternatives
to teaching enterprise to students "Create suitable extra curricular
activities. Give interesting talks, run interesting events, organize
national entrepreneurship events or events that encourage innovations.
Basically, get your students to pitch IDEAS.
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