Are the UK’s entrepreneurs getting all social on us?

Myself and 4Pioneers partner-in-crime Nick Lockey went to the World Entrepreneurship Summit last week at the invitation of Oli Barrett and Steve Moore (thanks again both).

Some really interesting stuff going on - the two highlights of the day were Kevin Spacey’s fantastic talk on the community centred business model of the Old Vic (apparently it has NO arts funding whatsoever - that’s some achievement) and the brilliant session hosted by Oli on enterprise education. This was really useful for us in the context of 4Pioneers which we’re developing around that exact subject.

Most interestingly for me, almost everything I heard had something to do with social enterprise. I was quite surprised as I don’t think it was a theme for the day. Are we really getting to a point where it’s becoming natural practice for entrepreneurs to create a social benefit in everything they do, as well as making profit?

I’d like to think so but I’m not yet convinced - I still meet people to this day who don’t believe that humans are causing climate change so we’ve got some way to go yet.

It was very encouraging though and has confirmed for me even more strongly that social enterprise is going to be massive in the next 10 years.