Innovacion

You Are An Entrepreneur

1. You are creative. You see opportunities. You are able to assess them quickly. You are happy to spend time exploring opportunities. You can think your way out of tight corner. You can communicate these opportunities without Powerpoint. You have wanted to do this all your life.  You think big.

2. You are a doer. You make things happen quickly. You are organised. You start and finish tasks. You will roll your sleeves up and will tackle anything. You chant Churchill’s mantra of “action this day” to yourself.  You know selling is more important than strategy.

3. You are motivated. You do things because they are there to be done. You enjoy a challenge. You know that 16 hours a day in a job you love is less tiring than 8 hours in one you hate. You know the value of your self-confidence. You are starting your business for more than just money. You know all mission statements are pointless.

4. You are persistent. You are energetic and enthusiastic. You have stamina to maintain your efforts. You are able to make progress each and every day. You set yourself milestones and goals. You keep going. You know that winning races is often about who slows down least rather than who runs fastest.

5. You learn from failure. You bounce back. You are made from brass so you will put yourself in a situation where you can fail.  You are made from Teflon so failure doesn’t stick. You see criticism as learning. You are able to experiment and learn quickly.

6. You have a hunger for knowledge. You value practical knowledge above theoretical knowledge. You learn by doing. You are happy to explore left field ideas. You actively share knowledge and test ideas. You copy and adapt all the time.

7. You are networked. You know who you know is more important than what you know. You invest in networking. You know that networking is a learnt skill. You can describe your business in one sentence. You are not afraid to ask for help. You have business soulmates.

8. You have a passion for improvement. You want to improve yourself. You want to improve your organisation. You want new ideas from your staff. You know that learning is the job. You spend resources developing your staff. You want the right people on the bus.

9. You are able to cope with uncertainty. You make sense out of chaos. You give direction. You can develop and articulate a vision. You are agile and flexible.

Is E-Learning Delivering?

Electronic provision of education.
E-learning involves the provision of education via interactive, electronic means. It usually involves the delivery of training material via a computer and over. An e-learning system will typically consist of: a learner management system (LMS) which replicates the administration role; learning content or courseware within a Learning Content Management System (LCMS) which guides students through the material; monitoring tools that allows tutor to provide feedback and undertake marking; and tools for developing courseware. A range of benefits are suggested:
• Training can be tailored to meet a range of learning needs
• E-learning is cheaper than classroom learning
• Employees are able to learn faster
• Greater customer retention where employees learn improved support skills
• Flexible study time for individuals
• Self-paced learning
• Effective monitoring of student performance

Despite high growth forecasts success has been patchy. The e-learning market includes learner management systems, course content suppliers and software companies’ online guides. Forrester estimate the learner management system market will grow at annual rate of 22% from $450 million in 2003 to reach $1 billion in 2007. Datamonitor predict that the global e-learning market for higher education will grow by 12% per annum to reach $1.9 billion by 2008.  However, while Forrester found that only 15% of respondents who had implemented an e-learning system were satisfied with it, 75% still planned to invest in the technology.

About to turn the corner?
While early e-learning systems were first developed in the 1970s, the explosion of the Internet in the 1990s created huge interest and huge hype. Universities developed electronic courseware (e.g. Open University) and companies re-engineered their training departments (e.g. Unipart). However, “irrational exuberance” resulted in some spectacular failures. The UK’s public funded e-learning university (UKeU) which aimed to attract foreign students to online courses at UK universities was scrapped in May 2004 at a cost to the public purse of £62 million.  After one year the UKeU had attracted just 900 students at a cost of £44,000/student.  The Commons Committee enquiry into the failure has noted a lack of market research, inadequate marketing activity, too much expenditure on technology (£14 million) rather than on content and a failure to learn lessons from similar failed experiments in the US.  But the increasing availability of higher bandwidth internet connections is reinvigorating the e-learning sector. The main suppliers are universities and business schools, specialist e-learning vendors and mainstream technology companies who have added LMS to their products.

Future directions.
In the future E-learning is predicted to provide:
• Varied teaching styles. Teaching methods will vary to suit an individual’s preference for visual (e.g. diagrams) or auditory learning (e.g. spoken word).
• Student centred learning.  Individuals will be able to design their own syllabus.
• Contextual learning.  The leaner is profiled in relation to their work context and progression.  Further learning is based on their individual requirements.

Humpty Dumpty Effect in the Public Sector

At the LGA Annual Conference in July 2004, James Strachan, Chairman of the Audit Commission, addressed efficiency and devolved decision-making in the public sector. A key concept was the humpty dumpty effect.

“As taxpayers’ money flows down vertically from the Exchequer to the locality, what we see is the ‘humpty dumpty’ effect: large amounts of taxpayers’ money are earmarked for say regeneration, which is then broken down and channelled through numerous central government departments. The result is a plethora of agencies at work and a multiplicity of funding streams, all often operating with little or no co-ordination. Then you (the authorities) at the local level are forced to try to put humpty dumpty back together again. Extraordinarily inefficient.”

So what does James Strachan suggest to address this problem and improve the delivery of public services to citizens?

a) Understand each other better. Second civil servants from Central Government to Local Agencies.

b) Make co-operation mandatory between Central Government departments in common policy areas. Turf wars over ownership do not improve service delivery to the end user.

c) Work in partnership. Local Strategic Partnerships bring together leaders of different services. By meeting and understanding each other better trust grows. Local Public Service Boards should be able to develop whole plans for local areas.

d) Combine different streams of funding into a single flow. Pooled budgets, joint decisions and joint understanding.  This is the next logical step for partnerships.

e) Local government to become more proactive and ambitious in how best to manage central/local relations. 

f) Use partnerships to break down boundaries and old structures to achieve the efficiency gains outlined in the Gershon report.  It is estimated that over £200 million can be saved from the administration of council tax and housing benefits alone just by implementing best practice that already exists.

g) Regulation as a tool for improvement rather than a meddling regime. Reduce and improve the co-ordination of public sector regulation but the focus will remain on helping the poor performers.

h) People not structures make an impact. “Create a culture of customer responsiveness where innovation is prized and where calculated risks to experiment with new ways of providing services are encouraged”.

Run Your Company Like Churchill

The process of globalisation and increasing levels of competition mean that leading and managing a business is becoming more challenging than ever.  Directors and managers now have to make critical choices that will determine their ultimate success and survival.  With these challenges, there are lessons to be learnt from great war leaders who have had to make similar strategic choices under intense pressure and with enormous consequences.  While Winston Churchill’s grand strategy of the Second World War has attracted enormous academic and political attention there are many lessons for the management and leadership of all firms.

1. Courageous and heroic.  Churchill’s leadership style was courageous and heroic.  He is acknowledged as a truly awe-inspiring character.  Churchill demonstrated this by being highly visible, memorable and wanting to be at the centre of action.  For example, he had to be prevented from taking part in the D-Day landings.  This is MBWA – management by walking about.  This courageous and visible leadership style builds loyalty far beyond what is rational and is the necessary approach in certain situations rather than a consensual, managerial approach.  So in certain circumstances strong visionary leadership should be accommodated and encouraged despite the often high risks involved.  Risk taking can produce success if a leader is strongly supported by a highly competent team who are equally dedicated to the same goals.

2. Knowledgeable with good communication skills.  Churchill had both verbal dexterity and a good strategic grasp based on a deep knowledge of political history and war.  Almost uniquely for a politician Churchill was deeply interested in and understood military matters after over 30 years of experience prior to the Second World War.  This started at the end of 19th century when he was as a journalist reporting on the Boer Wars in South Africa and was followed by time in the Admiralty.  As a result “the sweeping character of Churchill’s personal authority was almost unprecedented in modern democracy”.  Being a skilled communicator is a necessary skill for all leaders but not enough on its own.  However, when allied with good strategic judgement based on experience it is a powerful combination. 

3. Overcome early barriers.  While Churchill enjoyed social privilege he had an emotionally deprived childhood and poor school achievements to overcome.  Successful leaders are often very driven and ambitious people.  Much of the motivation for this is linked to early disappointments in their lives or wanting to prove themselves in a way others don’t.  So leadership traits can be strengthened by relative early failure and delayed intellectual growth.  Early struggle is often a prime motivator of an entrepreneur. 

4. Dominant character.  Churchill quickly matured and developed into a dominant character – both charming and rude  as circumstances dictated.  However, his powerful personality often became a draw back.  There were time consuming wrangles over grand strategy in which Churchill appeared to have overruled the right of the military in a bid to impose a new initiative or scheme without the necessary preparation or proper consultation.  Therefore gifted leaders have to be skilfully managed by an effective peer-group which can be a formidable undertaking.  Re-structuring of the top management teams and decision making processes can go someway to deal with this.  However, dominant leaders can be difficult to work with.

5. Action orientated.  High achievers tend to be action orientated - one of Churchill’s motto’s was “action this day” – and are hugely beneficial to firms.  The ability to deal with urgent and important tasks and leave less important issues is a key skill in time management. 

6. Strategic sense.  There is much debate about Churchill’s strategic decisions.  He managed to get more things right (e.g. the spectre of iron curtain falling across Europe) than wrong (e.g. Gallipoli and the Dardanelles campaign).  His strategic shortcomings undoubtedly diminished his influence at critical times when his influence should have mattered more.  For example his influence waned in the face of slow American decision-making and Stalin’s strident agenda.  No leader is able to get every decision right but the trick is to get the majority right and learn from the ones you get wrong.

7. Creative Tensions.  By becoming an expert in a tightly centralised hierarchy that he had devised, Churchill was able to be hugely effective.  As well as being Prime Minister, Churchill made himself Minister of Defence and the one civilian member of the four-man chiefs of staff committee.  Churchill therefore produced a creative tension of both a positive and negative kind which is necessary for to consistently good leadership.  Strong leadership will create both positive and negative tensions at all levels in an organisation.  As in the case of Churchill, for an organisation to be successful the positive must outweigh the negative.

How to engage with small businesses

What is the issue?
Small firms form a key constituency of many local economies.  At a national level, the 1.1 million small firms (with less than 250 employees) and 2.9 million freelancers and sole proprietors provide over 13 million jobs.  So any major redevelopment or regeneration project should involve the many small businesses which together act as a significant economic driver.

Small businesses are generally misunderstood.  Like people they are a pretty heterogeneous group.  While there are common business approaches and attitudes there is also a wide variety of motivations for being in business.  In London over a third are family owned and run businesses.  Rather than purely pursuing profit at all costs, people starting businesses are often looking for autonomy, a way into employment when others routes are closed or for a personal challenge.

Engaging with small businesses is becoming more important.  The increased requirements for consultation under the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 mean that understanding how to consult with small businesses is rising up the agenda.  Statements of Community Involvement will need to explain how communities and stakeholders will be engaged in the preparation and revision of local development documents and consideration of planning applications. Involvement should aim to be “active, meaningful and continued throughout both processes” and should include local firms or their representatives.  Furthermore, the start of the Local Authority Business Growth Incentive Scheme in April 2005 will give Local Councils the potential to secure direct financial incentives from promoting local economic growth.

Why engage with small businesses?
Small businesses are interested in their local area.  As they operate locally they have a distinct interest in the local environment and often a good local knowledge that can help professional planners, architects and regeneration professionals in their work.  All will be interacting with the local council, have a high concentration of local employees (who all have votes) and often live nearby with children at local schools.  They invest in the local area, especially if they are freeholders, and their support can be vital for physical and transport developments.  The growing number of Business Improvements Districts (BIDs) have firms paying for and taking control of increased local service provision.

Engagement should also be seen as an insurance policy to prevent poor relations with local businesses.  Freeholding small businesses can landlock a major development.  They can be vocal in the local press.  They can move to other areas taking valuable local jobs and supplier contracts.  They can disengage from regeneration activities (e.g. training and mentoring opportunities).

How to engage with a small business?
You have to start thinking like a small business to appreciate what will concern them.  Firstly, they value clear information to help the sort of decision making they do all day long.  Many of their concerns are due to a lack of information and most are persuadable by reason.  They want to know the timescales of activities to assess how it will affect their business.  Secondly, and this may seem obvious, at the very least between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Monday to Friday they will be working.  If you want to talk to them or get them to meet don’t take away a great chunk of their working day.  Thirdly, they like action.  They will not understand why something takes weeks to happen let alone months or years.  They have to respond to customers and suppliers rapidly.  That will be their culture.  They won’t sit in meetings that are going nowhere.  Fourthly, they operate on trust and value consistency.  If they say they will do it they mean it.  So non-action from a public organisation suggests the sort of unreliability that makes a small firm nervous.  Lastly, to run a successful small business you will have to be resourceful, tenacious and adaptable.  Respect small businesses for this and avoid being the professional who is lecturing them.

Turn the tables, use their 4 Ps
One of the oldest concepts in marketing is the Four Ps.  Use this approach to engage small firms as “customers”:

Product: What are you offering small firms and what do you want in return?  Do you know enough about your local business base to do this?  Information should be business focussed and clear.  Additional benefits (e.g. the opportunity to network with other local firms) will increase the attraction.

Place: Where and when are you going to do this?  Think in terms of business hours and informal locations that you would like to go at the end of the day (i.e. not a rush-hour crawl across town to a Civic Centre).

Promotion:  How are you going to communicate with your local business base?  Try to understand their preferred and valued communication channels and use them.  This may mean hanging round a café on an industrial estate or using an intermediary organisation.

Price:  Do you understand the financial costs and benefits of a development or a regeneration project for the local businesses?  Small firms’ fear of CPO may come from a lack of knowledge.  Once this is overcome they tend to be happy to negotiate as they do that all the time.

Case Study: Tottenham Hale
North London Chamber of Commerce on behalf of the London Borough of Haringey have been engaging small businesses to ensure they are involved in a proposed 138 ha development around Tottenham Hale in North London.  To do this North London Chamber of Commerce has acted as a neutral but informed business intermediary between businesses and the public sector.  There are significant advantages in both directions.  The local businesses have been helped by having a co-ordinating organisation to listen to their concerns, run a series of business friendly events and provide clear information.  The local authority and their professional advisers have the advantage of being able to engage with an existing business group, gain an understanding of the local business base and to develop productive working relationships.

Future London Ideas

At the Future London Masterclass on 6 April 2005 at the Mayfair Conference Centre, the Executive Chair of Future London, Honor Chapman, asked for new ideas for the future economic and physical development of London.  This drew from the discussions concerning the detrimental impact that risk aversion and a blame culture has on supporting the implementation of innovative approaches, ideas and projects.  The following ideas have been developed by Andy Rumfitt (Innovacion) and Simon Davis (then of GVA Grimley).

A: Must Have Ideas

1. Construct a new and significant (central/Thames Gateway) London park to counter the increasing densification of London’s urban fabric.  There is evidence that land prices adjacent to the park will increase by enough to compensate for loss of property on the park site. Also consider a Linear Park along the embankment as a green access route into the Capital.

2. Close central London to traffic for one weekend day a month in the summer and make public transport free.  This would create a totally different experience of how a city centre would operate without cars and increase the popular mandate for introducing more radical transport solutions.

3. The tube must have sustained and continual investment and aim to be the best public transport system in any major global city (with measurement of benchmark metrics).  Rather than incremental changes in four hour windows each night consider the short, sharp shocks of closing entire sections for intensive renewal so the benefits are brought forward and residents and businesses are more tolerant of the disruption.  This should be a key investment area for London plc and it is a good discipline to view London as a company.

4. A radical change to the buses in central London which creates clarity for those people who do not understand bus routes.  Make buses operate more like a tube system in central London with similar colour coding along key routes within the Circle Line central area.  Bus routes should most closely integrate with tube stops.  Improved legibility will help increase usage by businesses and visitors.  Reintroduce the Routemaster bus!

5. Develop and implement a clear and sensible policy about building on flood plains in and around London.

6. The current position where VAT is not levied on new development but is on refurbishment needs to change as it does not support the preservation of London’s built heritage.  Identify pilot areas of London where VAT is charged on new build but not on refurbishments to make restoration more commercially viable and to encourage retention and re-use (e.g. Heritage Improvement Districts).

7. Make all new housing developments in London no higher than six storeys so blocks are constructed in a more European layout around a central courtyard with integrated parking.  There are significant management issues for buildings over 10 storeys and their design principles become badly skewed towards trophy architecture.  The result is a similar density but with a better built form.  Also consider restricting the marketing of whole developments to only overseas investors, who often leave it empty and thus additional housing space is not being provided for “Londoners”.

8. Institute a massive programme of mature tree planting across London’s road and rail gateway points.  What are rail corridors so badly planted and almost completely ignored as green arteries when they are seen by millions of people.

9. Open all bus lanes to motorbikes (and perhaps even commercial traffic) as they don’t hold up buses.

10. Promote the development of large firm incubator projects in regeneration areas.  This would involve a large firm in a specific sector acquiring 50% more office space than they require.  They are then helped in providing very flexible subletting to a range of small firms in a similar sector (e.g. built environment, accountancy, creative sector).  There would be support services on site (e.g. meeting rooms, printing, library, event room) and it would feel more collegiate than much of the current serviced office space.  There would be lots of potential for networking, joint working and learning.

11. Undertake radically different procurement approaches for the professional services used in regeneration and economic development.  Replace the costs of risk management (long and expensive procurement approaches that impose enormous costs on both client and contractor) with a more flexible and iterative approach.  Pool the saved costs as to cover any “failures” in a self-insurance model.  This could, for example, involve the public sector creating a project management firm to contract with 10 small, innovative firms who are not able to access large contracts or buying a two days time from a number of small firms to come up with visionary ideas.  Consider borrowing from a venture capital model as the public sector is investing funds in alternative delivery approaches and install Board members on the smaller delivery organisations to manage risk and ensure adequate performance.  This could also extend to more radical approaches to public funding investment such as co-investment with the private sector for commercial returns on a pari passu basis.

B: Could Have Ideas

12. Institute a Christmas market to rival the best in Europe and decide whether London really wants to do something sensible on New Year’s Eve rather than the annual damp squib that seems to occur at the last minute.

13. Roll out a number of home zone experiments in parts of London where the role of cars could be massively diminished and additional facilities are provided for local residents in the released space (e.g. children’s play areas).

14. Full integration of business support service with the private sector.  All firms need to have a bank, an accountant and probably a solicitor.  All these professionals generally have a good credibility with their client base and it would be easy for them to cross-sell publicly funded services.  Take-up would be higher, services would be integrated into their business needs and marketing costs of public sector services reduced enormously.

15. Tax incentives for Growth.  Any London firm showing a percentage improvement in growth (or Gross Value Added) which is validated by an ‘accredited’ accountant should result in a tax benefit.  Currently SMEs are not motivated to report this growth statistic and it is required by the LDA as they take on the Business Link for London contract (April 2005).  The scheme could be funded by a reduction in general business support activities.

16. Research shows that SMEs who have business plans and training plans are more likely to have competitive growth.  Offer via the banks (all companies have a bank) a reduction in interest rates for firms that can demonstrate they have a current and appropriate business and training plan.  Validated by business support network or accountants (both accredited in some way).

17. Skills. Individual tax concessions for individuals successfully completing particular accredited skills training e.g. Adult Learner Key Skills, construction training – concession to be held over if individual out of work.  Similarly, concessions available to employer as incentive to allow staff to attend appropriate training courses.

18. Incentivise recycling and make it “sexy”.  Offer meaningful benefits to residents and businesses who beat recycling targets and fund it from fines on those who take no action.