Young entrepreneurs need business support

A report published by the Make Your Mark campaign has called for more business support to be provided for the increasing number of young people aiming to set up new businesses.

According to the report, 'running my own business' is now the leading career choice for 14-30 year olds. Unfortunately, not enough business support is available to help some of these youngsters' dreams turn into reality.

The report calls for more innovative support programmes utilising entrepreneurs, mentors, connectors and social media to reach out more directly to young people, rather than more traditional forms of business support that tend to be resource-intensive and difficult to scale up.

Peter Grigg of the Make Your Mark campaign told Bytestart:

“There is a big gap between those who aspire to run their own businesses and those that actually do. This market is overlooked by traditional forms of business support and some young people are falling off the ‘cliff edge’ after education. We believe that peer-to-peer support programmes, mentors and realistic role models are a more effective means of reaching and supporting a larger number of young people; current business support models could be re-engineered to utilise these more customer-focused tools.”

The report recommends four key actions:

1. Reach young thinkers more effectively – through innovative communications channels such as personalised campaigns, competitions and social media like Facebook and Bebo.
2. Bridge the gap between enterprise education and business support – through new relationships between education business links and business support, enterprise and innovation ‘hatcheries’ in schools and colleges and new forms of work experience.
3. Foster stronger, more sustainable ideas – through creativity training, better training in skills such as marketing and design and practical support on intellectual property rights.
4. Ensure business support is designed for empowering entrepreneurs – through peer-to-peer support, use of mentors and support networks.