THE ENTREPRENEURS' MANIFESTO by Doug Richard January 2010

This enlightened Manifesto, along with its analysis of the current economy and state of capitalism in general, I wish to use to set the tone of my blog. 

More on the subject and work of Mr Richard (as well as a comment I left in answer to his enlightening account of a 23rd February seminar at 10 Downing Street) can be found on his School for Startups forum.

"We are a nation that has everything it needs to enter the 21st century on a wave of growth and prosperity. But to do so we must harness the only force for growth, for prosperity and for fairness and social justice that exists: the entrepreneurial culture.



This is not about capital. This is not about the few getting rich at the expense of the many. This is not about the preservation of privilege. If anything it is the key to the opposite: the creation of ladders of social mobility, and increasing of the wealth of the nation so we can afford the services we believe are the rights of our citizens: to be healthy, to be educated, to be safe and to remain free.


But harnessing entrepreneurialism first means understanding it: an entrepreneur takes on the risk of innovating in the expectation of being rewarded for success. Reducing the incentives of being rewarded, increasing the obstacles to create new enterprises, limiting the shape and type of entrepreneurial activity and not investing in the key infrastructure upon which the next wave of innovation will depend, all combine to emasculate our nascent entrepreneurs.


Thus we call for our government to change its priorities.


We must increase economic freedom for new businesses and small businesses and all businesses that take new business risk. We must cut the time it takes to start a new business. We must radically streamline the effort of complying with government regulation and exempt the smallest businesses from many of the regulations entirely.


We must sweep clean the entire government funded industry of business support and leave behind solely an institution whose remit is to expedite and simplify the effort of small business to manage the burden that government places upon it.


We must free up the savings of our families, friends and communities so that they may give, invest or lend their own small capital into the nascent businesses of their children, their friends and their communities with credits and exemptions that radically encourage the activity.


We must stop paying people to be un‐employed and begin to share the cost of them being taught to be employed. Apprenticeship is not solely for the trades; it is for any job in any com¬pany. We face a lost generation of students and young graduates with no hope for jobs whilst employers have no means to underwrite the period they need to make those students into productive employees.


We must recognize that the largest customer in the UK is the government itself. The government must adopt a requirement that a specific percentage of all of its procurement will be through small and medium businesses. It must place the responsibility for compliance with industry and at no cost to itself drive revenue to our entrepreneurs and open the doors of government to innovation.


We must broaden the scope for social entrepreneurs by creating new legal frameworks that ex¬plicitly encourage a broad range of social businesses from co‐ownership models such as John Lewis to for‐profit businesses that seek to achieve a social bottom line as well as a traditional profit.


Finally, we must recognize the centrality of connectedness in the competition amongst nations. The United Kingdom must wire itself and do so urgently. Just as our roads and trains are a public service and a natural monopoly; so too is true broadband. True broadband is not 1MBof information trickling down to some of our homes. It is 100Mb to every doorstep in this country. It is the key infrastructure that will kindle a wave of creative destruction and increased wealth that will match the industrial revolution. It will reduce the stress on our crowded transport systems, it will re‐vitalize neglected sections of our nation, it will place the key tools in place to amplify and distribute scarce resources in education and health care. And it is achievable now.


Finally, we must understand that we do not understand. People are not empowered to step out on their own, take risk, hope for reward, and move on from failure. The corrosive impact of an overprotective State is not merely the loss of our sense of responsibility to a civil society; it is the even more profound loss of our sense of capacity to change society, to have an impact, to be, in short, an entrepreneur.


Entrepreneurship can be taught and must be learned. "