NACUE Advocacy

• NACUE Advocacy
• Advocacy Activities

Context

Being enterprising is about having ideas and making them happen. It is the capacity of individuals, groups and organisations to respond to change, take risks, innovate and develop and execute new ideas and approaches.

Students and graduates play a critical role in developing an entrepreneurial economy that is capable of surmounting the challenges of the 21st century. Whether they are wishing to go into an increasingly competitive world of employment, or they want to start their own business; equipping students and graduates with enterprise skills and an entrepreneurial mindset is essential.

The Challenge

Policies and programmes to promote university enterprise often focus on engaging university vice chancellors and enterprise educators to ensure that entrepreneurship is adequately supported within universities. While this is important, such engagement is often several degrees removed from the students that these programmes and policies aim to affect.

The Opportunity

While educators and researchers work hard to reform universities from within by embedding enterprise in the curriculum, student-led enterprise societies like the 70+ that NACUE supports, trains and connects, are already delivering significant success on the ground. These independent student-led groups have the capacity to be incredible catalysts for enterprise by driving a grassroots movement among the student population and providing a peer-led approach where nascent entrepreneurs support and enable each other.

Student-led enterprise societies work to build enterprise ecosystems from the ground up bringing together local entrepreneurs and SMEs, university alumni and the many fragmented resources, events and initiatives provided by various stakeholders. These opportunities are then easily shared with entrepreneurial students across all disciplines and degrees.

What we are advocating for?

Supporting Student Enterprise Societies

• Sustainability: As the leadership capacity of enterprise society leaders directly impacts the ability of societies to promote enterprise and entrepreneurship, we must provide them with the knowledge, skills, support and resources that they need to be effective enterprise champions at their universities. Supporting university enterprise societies and leaders will help to create an enabling environment for budding entrepreneurs - unlocking the untapped entrepreneurial potential of students across the UK.
• Funding: Using data gathered from 65 societies in September 2009 (excluding Oxford & Cambridge to avoid distortion - they have a combined budget of over £120k), our societies generally engage 450-1000 students each, running around 20 events a year on an average budget of just £3,500. Our latest figures show that our 70 societies engage over 40,000 students in total.

We aim to help societies reach a level of maturity which will allow them to raise up to £10,000 a year for activities and events. A £10k budget - in our view an optimal figure for established & sustainable societies - would allow them to make a significant, measurable impact on an estimated total of 70,000 students a year.

Supporting Student & Graduate Entrepreneurs

Several policy challenges need to be addressed in order to provide an enabling culture for nascent entrepreneurs within universities.

• Give sustained funding to establish and run business start-up support schemes within all UK universities.
• Fund the development of more incubators for students and graduates and facilitate regeneration of empty business premises for cheap use by new businesses
• Provide start-ups with much easier access to legal, financial and marketing advice from government, business agencies and experienced entrepreneurs
• Streamline the process for start-ups to hire staff and allow much greater flexibility in recruiting unemployed graduates