Enterprise and entrepreneurship

What's it about?

Entrepreneurship is about having the vision, organisational and people skills to make a commercial success of new opportunities. This combination of skills is both sought by employers and essential for anyone wanting to start their own business.

For example, employers may want to know that you can demonstrate:

Entrepreneurship

  • Knowing about the technical aspects and ongoing challenges of setting up a business and keeping it sustainable.

Initiative

Are you good at identifying opportunities and setting and achieving goals? Do you have any experience of this, such as:

  • setting up a business
  • helping to raise funds for a project or charity
  • starting something new and original.

Innovation and creativity

There are many different ways in which people can be creative. Do you have examples of:

  • thinking originally and imaginatively about a design brief
  • coming up with a creative solution to a problem
  • creating an original product or piece of art.

Commerical awareness

How much do you know and understand about business and the commercial environment? what experience do you have of:

  • working with customers (how many did you serve an hour?)
  • being set and meeting sales targets
  • doing promotional work
  • coming up with ideas to maximise profit
  • working with a budget.

Do you read the Financial Times or other financial/business news media to keep informed? What are they? What have you learnt from them?

Developing opportunities

This overlaps substantially with examples of initiative and innovation and creativity; for instance do you have examples of:

  • Identifying opportunities to enhance a service or product, or its promotion
  • Taking the initiative and developing those ideas into reality.

Develop entrepreneurial skills with Beepurple

The university's students, graduates and staff can join the beepurple network if they are interested in developing their business skills.

Membership is free and business support includes regular workshops and masterclasses including the UltraViolet intensive business start-up summer course.

There is a range of beepurple factsheets and presentations that you can download. These are intended to help students thinking of running or developing their own businesses. They are also very useful in helping you understand what is involved in planning and running a business from having an idea to selling your products or services.

Beepurple's resources can help you improve your commercial awareness even if you are not thinking of running your own business. They might also help you recognise ways you can contribute to the business you are working in as an employee. Both can help you to impress employers in the future.

contentbox-exclaim-orange.gifDetails of all the support available for student entrepreneurs can be found at our pages on enterprise.

 

What's next?

Having looked at the four key groups of employability skills we'll now look at where you can go from here.