Edward Chaplin

The British Ambassador, Edward Chaplin, delivers a speech at La Sapienza University on the occasion of the Global Entrepreneurship Week, 17 November 2009

Ladies and gentlemen

Good afternoon. I’m very pleased to be with you here today, and delighted that La Sapienza has decided to mark Global Entrepreneurship Week this year. I am grateful to Professor Frati for allowing me this first opportunity as British Ambassador to Italy to address what is, I understand, the oldest public University in Rome. I would also like to thank Meta Group, who are once again organising the Global Week in Italy this year. And of course I am honoured to be sharing a platform with Carl Schramm – described by the Economist (Mr Berlusconi’s favourite newspaper) as the “evangelist of entrepreneurship”.

Global Entrepreneurship Week, like many great movements, started with an idea. The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, wanting to inspire innovation in youth, set up, in 2004, a grass roots campaign to encourage young people (under 30) in the UK to become more enterprising. The campaign is called ‘Make Your Mark’.  The centre piece was Enterprise Week.  Last year this became The Global Entrepreneurship Week combining the UK week with a similar US initiative which I am sure Carl will tell you more about. This year 87 countries are participating, with support from many world leaders and successful entrepreneurs.

One of the unfortunate side effects of the global economic crisis from which our countries are slowly recovering is to cause some to question the benefits of globalisation and to seek protection from their governments against the pressures on jobs.  In the EU, the Single Market is under real strain.  But surely the right lesson to learn from the crisis is that the global economy is here to stay and there is no hiding from it.  Rather than trying to protect jobs from competition, we have to find ways of beating the competition.  The only way to do that in our western developed countries, is by applying our brainpower and our skills – well represented in this room.  

So entrepreneurship is needed today more than ever.  Global Entrepreneurship Week is encouraging entrepreneurs the world over to network globally. Our conviction is that making the entrepreneurial spirit global will create business opportunities and drive international trade – the lifeblood of the world economy.

This year, as well as marking Global Entrepreneurship Week, Europe is celebrating Creativity and Innovation.  It’s innovation I want to focus on today.  Like entrepreneurship, innovation is something that everyone supports.  Governments are good at making ringing endorsements of the concept.  The British Government even added Innovation to the name of a government department they created this summer, merging two existing departments into the new department for Business, Innovation and Skills – all the elements needed to compete in a global economy.  

In the EU, governments have been happy to identify innovation as a priority since the Lisbon European Council in 2000 which led to an agreement on ‘Partnership for Growth and Jobs’ – the so called “Lisbon agenda”.  This set two over-arching targets for Member States to meet by 2010: Investment of 3% of Europe’s GDP in research and development and an overall employment rate of 70%. More detailed aims include, increasing the employment rate of women to over 60%, and higher employment of older workers, with an objective of achieving annual economic growth across the EU of around 3%.

It's true that progress towards these targets has not been easy - especially in the light of the current financial crisis.  Some countries are closer to meeting the objectives than others, but all have made progress.  And merely having the targets has shifted the European policy debate; no longer do we question the link between the 'social' agenda of education and skills, and the 'economic' performance of our economies - the links are now clear and well accepted.

But a lot remains to be done – for example, the EU’s regulation of Intellectual Property is hopelessly fragmented and costly.  The Venture Capital market remains too fragmented.  Support for innovation initiatives is too bureaucratic. In 2010, the EU is due to renew the Lisbon Strategy - this will give us the opportunity to review and refocus the Strategy to ensure that our economies can meet the coming challenges.

Another example of Europe’s commitment is The Lead Market Initiative. EU member states recognised the importance of creating the right framework to foster ‘lead’ markets, where the EU has comparative advantage. In May 2008 six markets were selected and action plans drawn up [eHealth, sustainable construction, protective textiles, bio-based products, recycling and renewable energy].

One crucial element for driving innovation is the internet infrastructure.  Last week, the EU Commissioner for Information, Society and Media Viviane Reding launched the EU’s Internet Innovation Strategy to boost EU internet infrastructures.   She gave healthcare as an example of where better use of the internet could make vast improvements in treating an ageing EU population, including providing such treatment remotely.

Governments talking about all this is easy.  What we need is action!  This is what GEW is all about.  Let me give you 2 examples:

• Dr Hanna Sykulska-Lawrence recently won the UK’s Young Woman Engineer Award from the Institution of Engineering and Technology. Last year Hanna invented the microscope that went to Mars on the recent Phoenix mission;
• Anthony Ganjou who was one of the finalists in last year’s Enterprising Young Brits, a competition launched during the Global Entrepreneuship Week, has developed a business offering high impact, sustainable eco-advertising.  Since the competition, he has opened a US office, run successful campaigns for the BBC and others, increased turnover by 300 per cent in the last 8 months and doubled the number of employees.

Innovation is at the heart of the knowledge economy which the EU aspires to. As traditional jobs disappear, the stark fact is that we cannot afford not to invest in innovation.  But there is nothing to be gloomy about. Look at how in the developing world new technologies are helping to break the cycle of poverty.  A recent World Bank study found that an extra ten mobile phones per 100 people in a typical developing country boosts GDP growth by 0.8 per cent, just by helping small entrepreneurs flourish.

Here, universities of course have a crucial role: they are the institutions which push forward the frontiers of knowledge and encourage new ideas.  What we have to get better at in both our countries is to strengthen the links between the academic world of universities and the entrepreneurial world of new business. My home town in the UK, Cambridge, includes not just a famous university, but the UK’s first Science Park. Here over 100 companies have now established themselves to take advantage of the knowledge base of the University, the recent focus being very much on high tech areas such as photonics, nanotechnology and material sciences.

The British Government has decided to help this process along by more than doubling the science budget and setting up an Innovation Investment Fund to help start up and spin out new businesses across digital and life sciences, clean technology and advanced manufacturing.  

Another priority for the British Government is using the need to tackle Climate Change as a driver for new sustainable economic growth.  In Italy, on this subject, one hears more about the problems and costs than about the opportunities. But as the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said last week:

“Tackling climate change too is not fundamentally about problems, challenging as these are, but about opportunities. The push towards decarbonisation will be one of the major drivers of global and national economic growth over the next decade”.  He added that “the economies which embrace the green revolution earliest will reap the greatest economic rewards”.

In the UK it’s estimated that the low carbon and environmental goods and services sector provides around 800,000 jobs – what we can call, for short, “green jobs”.  With growth in this sector estimated at over 4% this means that by the middle of the next decade over a million people will be employed in these green jobs.  For the renewable energy sector projected growth is even higher – between 5.5 and 7%.

We have some good examples of the opportunities for green growth from our European partners.  Germany has created a renewable energy sector worth over €24 billion a year, employing half a million people.  Denmark has created 20,000 jobs and generates €4 billion a year from the export of wind turbines. On recent visits here in Italy to Puglia and Le Marche, it has been encouraging to hear about regional and local authorities encouraging the growth of green jobs. And the younger generation is contributing too: the latest statistics (July-September 2009) tell us that of the 51,000 new businesses registered in Italy during this period 15,000 were by people under thirty - maybe even by some of you?

But in general I have to say that it’s surprising for a British Ambassador not to find more going on in the field of entrepreneurship and innovation in this nation with its unique history of creativity, a strong high tech tradition and precisely the pattern of small and medium enterprises with the flexibility to respond to these new challenges.

In the future there will be even greater opportunities outside Europe.  If China wants to reduce its Carbon intensity, as President Hu said in New York last week, and meet its target of 15% energy from renewables there will be new markets and opportunities for our technology and expertise. South Korea has put around 80% of its stimulus package into energy efficiency, water and waste management and renewable energy. Low carbon, therefore, is not a threat to economic recovery; it’s the market that’s driving recovery. Not just in the service sector, but in heavy industry and engineering.

Let me mention finally another aspect of innovation which our countries have in common – the link to the creative industries. About 4 per cent of UK export earnings are from the creative industries. They employ two million people in our economy. The potential of this sector as a motor of the economy however remains underexploited.

In both our countries, manufacturing – making things – remains important. (It is a popular myth that the UK economy now provides only services – more cars are manufactured in the UK than in Italy!). But in terms of added value in the global economy, the difference in making a car or a plane or a TV show or a video game is largely a meaningless one. Especially if you consider how integral and central to the manufacturing process innovative design is. For example the new Selfridges store in the Birmingham Bullring has become a national icon for innovative design. Future Systems broke the mould by drawing inspiration from the 15th century Baroque Church of Gesu’ Nuovo in Naples which uses the bugnato style. Just one example of the creative use of old ideas to produce something new and exciting.
So the message today is a simple: don’t wait for governments, they will do their best, but it’ll probably be too slow for you. When you have an innovative idea with business potential, go for it! Find a backer, and set to work.

I hope the examples from the GEW will inspire you.

Thank you

Today is the day!

Carl Schramm, the President of Kauffman Foundation will be at the La Sapienza event in Rome, together with the British Ambassador and the Rector of La Sapienza University.

Join it! :-)

From graduation to start-up: I Realize Start-Up Hack

The creation of new opportunities needs a mix of skills, research, hard work and, most of all, inspiration. The willingness to “Think big and turn ideas into reality” is one of the claims of the Global Entrepreneurship Week, a worldwide event that from 16 to 22 November 2009 “Will connect young people everywhere through local, national and global activities designed to help them explore their potential as self-starters and innovators”. Partnering with this, the TOP-IX Consortium of Turin, Italy, promotes the I Realize Start-Up Hack, a one-day workshop for developing the business plans of graduation thesis projects.

In collaboration with TesiCamp.org, an event where graduation students presented their thesis to professionals, companies and academics, I Realize Start-Up Hack will put together professionals with a mix of expertise in order to help a number of students to turn their thesis project into a business plan. At the end of the day a 10-slide presentation will be made and all the projects will be  “pitched” in front of a panel of senior professionals, entrepreneurs, mentors, etc. One of them will be rewarded.

In order to reach the maximum audience and foster the spirit of entrepreneurship, a broad range of social media tools will be used to involve participation and communicate the event among students and the public, e.g. Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/pages/I-Realize-The-Art-of-Disruption/69719028304) and Twitter (http://twitter.com/i_realize). The event will be also promoted by TesiCamp (http://www.facebook.com/tesicamp, http://Tesicamp.org), Infoservi.it, a leading blog on digital culture and technology, and Innov’azione, a magazine about the italian innovation ecosystem, as media partner.

...stiamo lavorando al cross-border Italia/Slovenia per la Global Entrepreneurship Week 2009!