Developing and Supporting Young Innovative Entrepreneurs in the UK - Research Proposal Example

Topic: Developing and supporting young innovative entrepreneurs in UK Name Class Unit Contents Contents 2 Introduction 3 Background context 3 Overall objective 4 Specific objectives 4 Research questions 4 Literature review 4 Methodology 6 Discussion of the proposals and limitations 8 Conclusion 10 References 11 Introduction Background context In United Kingdom (UK), the number of youth seeking work and career prospects is high. The migration of the young people to large cities in search for better opportunities is a major problem. Entrepreneurs are a great source of economic growth (Gregg, 2015). In UK, new business including tech start-ups, retailers and manufacturers are becoming pioneers in the market. Entrepreneurs and innovators in UK is a thriving field. Despite this, there is need to support the young entrepreneurs in their growth. Encouraging entrepreneurship involves funding, enhancing education systems and removing barriers which hinder their growth (Hardgrove, Rootham and McDowell, 2015). Through innovation and entrepreneurship, UK economy has been able to move from product based to service based or knowledge economy. It is necessary for UK to improve the attractiveness of the young people towards innovative entrepreneurship. The aim of this project is to solve the UK youth unemployment problem and inspire the youth towards entrepreneurship. In order to make the youth ideas work, there is need for support for the actual entrepreneurship and innovative ideas (Vogel, 2015). Therefore, there is need to develop a support system. Youth are the future of the UK region and the foundation laid by this project will help in fostering innovative entrepreneurial among young people and have a long impact on the region. Overall objective The overall objective for the project is to support economic and social development for UK through facilitating innovative entrepreneurial among the youth. This will help in reducing unemployment in the region. Specific objectives To evaluate and assess the impact of the current support to the young entrepreneurs and come with means to improve it. To create regional support systems which will make it possible to develop and implement innovative business ideas in UK by young entrepreneurs. The support system will be formed through Business networks Innovative entrepreneurial environment Education and training Creating regional awareness Research questions Why are the current support programs for innovative youth entrepreneurs in UK not working? What are the key requirements to improve and come up with the best system to support the young innovative entrepreneurs in UK? Literature review In UK, young people have been the most affected by unemployment. This was especially witnessed during the 2008 financial crisis where young people aged between 18-24 years were the most affected by underemployment (Gregg, 2015). When the organisation introduces the zero hours contracts during the crisis, the young people are also the most affected. In 2012, research proved that unemployment among those aged between 16-24 years was at 30% compared to the national level of 9% (Dhéret, 2013). Despite this, young people are educated and technologically proficient. Maas and Jones (2015), explains that this is a group that can discover their entrepreneurial abilities and venture into start-ups. According to Izzi (2013), the world labour market has been shrinking while the population is growing. Most of the youth lacks stable jobs and it’s estimated that worldwide, 47% of the unemployed are the youth. Entrepreneurship has been accepted by many as a way of reducing youth unemployment (Council of the European Union, 2012). Youth employment acts as a way of reducing poverty and integrating young people into the labour market. Baxter et al. (2014), shows that entrepreneurship can be used to unleash the potential from the youth. Research shows that fostering youth innovation should be given priority in UK. Compared to other developed countries, there is low level of entrepreneurial support in UK. Over the recent years, a lot of attention has been given to the large investment projects while youth innovation has lagged behind (Rhisiart and Jones-Evans, 2016). Youth lacks vital skill in cooperating and networking that can help them fully utilise their innovative capabilities. There is also low level of support for the youth venturing into entrepreneurship (Dhéret, 2013). According to Council of the European Union (2013), it’s evident that Europe 2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth, young people is highly placed on the agenda. The strategy supports education, training, employment, entrepreneurship, voluntary activities and social inclusion among others (Conway, 2014). The main objective is to give young people opportunities through education and labour market. Under this strategy, it is possible to promote entrepreneurship and innovation among youth in UK and other EU countries (Council of the European Union, 2013). The level of support offered to innovative entrepreneurs still lags in the region. The existing support programmes have failed to reach most of the entrepreneurs (Gupta, 2012). There is also low level of awareness among the youth on the existing programmes (European Commission, 2012). Based on the Edward Bono theory, lateral thinking can help people to come up with fresh ideas and means of solving problems (De Bono, 2015). It is important to cultivate the capability for the youth to innovate in the economy. Creativity and innovation are critical entrepreneurial skills (Kline, 2015). Also education can be used to generate motivation, competency and attitude towards innovation. Also, young people require mentorship when setting up or establishing new firms (Wiger et al., 2015). This implies that UK will have to increase their focus on ensuring young people have access to mentors. This can also be enhanced during their higher education (European Commission, 2012). Methodology The following methodology will be used by the project to evaluate the current support given to young entrepreneurs. A survey on the young people who have previously sought support for investment programmes. Young people will be surveyed based on their entrepreneurial activity in the past. Interviewing the members who offers support and get their perspectives on the current low level of support. A cost benefits analysis to review the value for money in the current interventions. The main intention is to have young people filling a survey based on the support they have received on the past programmes. The questionnaires used will be reviewed by a panel before they are used for the exercise. This will provide feedback on the design and their appropriateness. The research aims at administering the questionnaires to a sample of 100 young people who have entrepreneurial ambitions or those that have already ventured into innovative entrepreneurial activities. The sample will include different genders, races and social backgrounds. To establish the best regional support system for the innovative entrepreneurs, a comprehensive research will be carried out. This involves consultations with young entrepreneurs and wide range of stakeholders in the area of youth entrepreneurship. There is need for in-depth review of the literature from the youth economic and social entrepreneurship and innovative entrepreneurship. This includes use of relevant texts and peer reviewed journals. The main aim will be coming up with a summary of key information on youth entrepreneurship and vital factors that can help in enhancing youth engagement in innovative entrepreneurship. A questionnaire will be developed to capture and unlock the local knowledge, barriers and incentives provided to entrepreneurs. This will be administered to the local stakeholders to compliment the entrepreneurs’ experiences in UK. Furthermore, collaborating with a wide range of stakeholders in the innovative entrepreneurship will be developed. The study will be carried out with close collaboration with the local governments and labour unions. This will help in identifying different entrepreneurs in the UK region. An in-depth interview will be carried out with the young innovative entrepreneurs and local support bodies. This will help in coming up with implementation of the program and the expected deliverables. Most of the interviews can be carried on one to one basis while in some cases, participants can be interviewed together. Purposive sampling is very important when one wants to capture a wide range of views and experiences (Gray, 2013). Thus, it will be reasonable to use purposive sampling in this research to come up with a sample of the focus group. The sample involves people who share same experiences and are interested in innovative entrepreneurship. The sample also includes different ethnicity, races and gender to come up with a creative discussion. Use of framework is very vital in analysing the data from the study. Cost benefit analysis involves checking the key benefits and comparing them with their costs. Discussion of the proposals and limitations Support and promotion of innovative youth entrepreneurship can take various forms and involves a lot of actors. To come up with a comprehensive and viable system to help the youth, it will be vital to engage all actors. This may not be possible due to limited time and resources. This may require carrying out the research using a reasonable number of actors as participants to avoid high costs and save time. The actors chosen will act as the representative of the whole sample. There will be need to utilise Flyingstart which is a UK initiative to help graduate entrepreneurs. This will help in attaining a representative sample when interviewing young entrepreneurs. The main problem is the fact that the platform is internet based and has thousands of members and hundreds of experts. This makes it hard to locate the active members. Another challenge is the fact that gaining a diverse sample is hard when having a sample of 100 participants. This is a small sample based on the fact that the research covers the whole of UK. The participants are supposed to come from different racial groups, different areas, genders and denominations. This will require a thorough background check on the participants. Use of questionnaires in a research has several limitations. The first is the fact that the questionnaires must have short questions. This limits the ability to further interrogate especially in the open ended questions (Neuman, 2006). In some cases, there are chances that reactive effects may occur in cases where interviewee tries to show only what is socially desirable. This has to be avoided to make the research more objective. Another issue with use of questionnaires is the fact that people filling them may fail to recall vital information or have low self-awareness (Zivkovic, 2012). This may lead to wrong results. Data analysis from the questionnaires may be time consuming especially in open ended questionnaires. To minimise this, use of digital questionnaires to conduct the survey will be used. The data will have to be processed digitally. Research shows that digital processed data has few and is less costly. Interviews in this research are very vital. This is due to fact that they will provide in-depth information and provides higher response rates. The main drawback is time consumption and expense (Gray, 2013). This may limit the number of interviews that will have to be conducted. The research faces a limitation due to fact that it will also rely on the previous research from journals and texts. In some cases, secondary documents may be incomplete and also give a biased perspective. Also, there is little innovative entrepreneurship literature on UK. This may lead to use of data which is inapplicable to the general UK youth population. Due to this, this plan proposes use of peer reviewed journals and compliments the secondary data with the results from other research methods. The data from the secondary sources will be useful for collaboration and exploration (Rowley, 2012). This will make the research more credible and conclusive. Conclusion The plan proposes research on a project to develop and support young innovative entrepreneurs in UK. At the moment, the level of support for the innovative entrepreneurs is low and in some cases inaccessible. There is need for a system that supports the young innovative entrepreneurs. This is especially due to high rate of unemployment among the youth and dwindling job opportunities. There is need to access and analyse the existing system and come up with a new system that can reach all youth. Through addressing the shortcomings in the methodology, it will be possible to conduct the research and come up with the best system to support young innovative entrepreneurs in UK. References Baxter, A., Chapman, D.W., DeJaeghere, J., Pekol, A.R. and Weiss, T., 2014. Youth Entrepreneurship Education and Training for Poverty Alleviation: A Review of International Literature and Local Experiences. International Educational Innovation and Public Sector Entrepreneurship (International Perspectives on Education and Society, Volume 23) Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 23, pp.33-58. Conway, C., 2014. Supporting young entrepreneurs. The International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, 15(2), pp.135-136. Council of the European Union, 2012. Conclusions on fostering the creative and innovative potential of young people (2012/C 169/01) Council of the European Union, 2013. Maximising the Potential of Youth Policy in Addressing the Goals of the Europe 2020 Strategy - Adoption of Council Conclusions. Csikszentmihaly, M. (reprint 1996) Creativity, Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. Harper Collins e-books De Bono, E., 2015. The Mechanism of Mind: Understand how your mind works to maximise memory and creative potential. Random House. Dhéret, C. 2013. Youth unemployment – Does the EU care about its future? European Policy Centre. European Commission, 2012. Effects and Impact of Entrepreneurship Programmes in Higher Education. Gray, D.E., 2013. Doing research in the real world. Sage. Gregg, P., 2015. Youth unemployment in the UK: Cyclical fluctuations and the struggle for structural reform. No Country for Young People?, p.65. Gupta, P., 2012. Youth Entrepreneurship–The role of Entrepreneurship in Opportunity Development in UK job market. Palgrave Macmillan UK. Hardgrove, A., Rootham, E. and McDowell, L., 2015. Possible selves in a precarious labour market: Youth, imagined futures, and transitions to work in the UK. Geoforum, 60, pp.163-171. Izzi, V., 2013. Just keeping them busy? Youth employment projects as a peacebuilding tool. International Development Planning Review, 35(2), pp.103-117. Kline, M., 2015. Youth Entrepreneurship in Practice: A Comparative Case Study Analysis (Doctoral dissertation, Kent State University). Maas, G. and Jones, P., 2015. An Overview of Entrepreneurship Education. In Systemic Entrepreneurship: Contemporary Issues and Case Studies (pp. 22-95). Palgrave Macmillan UK. Neuman, W.L. 2006, Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches 6thEdition, Pearson International Edition, USA. Rhisiart, M. and Jones-Evans, D., 2016. The impact of foresight on entrepreneurship: The Wales 2010 case study. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 102, pp.112-119. Rowley, J., 2012. Conducting research interviews. Management Research Review, 35(3/4), pp.260-271. Vogel, P., 2015. Entrepreneurship: Turning Job Seekers into Job Creators. In Generation Jobless? (pp. 77-103). Palgrave Macmillan UK. Wiger, N.P., Chapman, D.W., Baxter, A. and DeJaeghere, J., 2015. Context matters: A model of the factors associated with the effectiveness of youth entrepreneurship training. Prospects, 45(4), pp.533-547. Zivkovic, J., 2012. Strengths and weaknesses of business research methodologies: Two disparate case studies. Business Studies Journal, 4(2), pp.91-99. 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