Yesterday we launched a new report: Educating Future Founders. With support from ABE, the not-for-profit skills development specialist and awarding organisation, we review the evidence for early interventions in entrepreneurship education. It makes the case for teaching children as young as eleven the basics of running a business. For a neat overview, read Sam Dumitriu’s article for CapX.

It’s choc-a-bloc with inspiring examples of organisations supporting young entrepreneurs across the world, such as Teach a Man to Fish’s School Enterprise Challenge, Prince’s Trust International’s Enterprise Challenge, ABE’s KidsMBA, and VIVITA.

And It’s packed with evidence as to why many of these interventions are valuable. For example, an analysis of Junior Achievement’s Company Programme, the most widely taught entrepreneurship programme in the world, followed 9,731 Swedish participants over sixteen years. As well as finding that participants were more likely to start a business, participants earned on average 10.2% more from entrepreneurship more than a decade after compared to entrepreneurs who did not participate.

While the evidence is significant, there is another benefit that’s laced throughout the report, and one that I think is often underplayed as it can’t be easily measured. Starting (or pretending to start) a business when you’re a child is a lot of fun.

School can be boring (and for those that struggle humiliating). There is perhaps an inevitability that at least some aspects of schooling will be tedious, but the injection of entrepreneurship into the day, or after school, is clearly a welcome break from the daily grind. I think we should want our children to be happy as an end in itself, but I also suspect this is why some of the interventions seem have such a high impact and seem to still have a positive influence years later.

This is our third report on education. The others being Future Founders, which we undertook with Octopus and my report for the APPG for Entrepreneurship on enterprise education at universities. It won't be our last.

Smart cookies
Building on last year’s Smart Data Review, the government has set out its Next Steps for Smart Data. For the uninitiated, Smart Data is the sharing of data with authorised third-party providers, which helps support innovative new services.

Open Banking, for example, has over a million individual and SME users, and over 250 authorised third parties and account providers. The likes of Moneybox and Xero prove that great entrepreneurial business can be built on the back of Smart Data, but as the consultation found there isn’t a sector that couldn’t benefit from it, with education, retail, transport, and health featuring prominently.

In education, new businesses could be created with access to willing individuals’ education records and proof of attainments. In transport, linking trains, airlines, and vehicle data could enable apps that automatically claim for redress following delays, or enable consumers to track their carbon footprint.

We’re often told that data is the new oil. It’s always struck me as a trite analogy. However, perhaps it makes sense in describing how, with support from government and innovative entrepreneurs, data can lubricate processes, making our lives that little bit easier.

Natasha Lomas has an extensive writeup at TechCrunch on the announcement and next steps.

London calling
Our friends from the Start-ups in London Libraries project of the British Library are looking for an expert volunteer to lead a free training webinar session to a group of business advisers based across their ten London Borough Libraries. (Last time they needed help like this, I asked in this newsletter and they got some great volunteers.)

These boroughs tend to be representative of communities often disadvantaged and under-represented in entrepreneurship and their client base are pre-start-ups and start-ups that have been running for less than a year. They are looking for advice on product pricing (ie. what entrepreneurs need to think about when pricing their product) and product creation and manufacturing (ie. what to look for in terms of safety, manufacturing abroad and how to do it).

It would be for 3 hours on either 2nd October or 6th November and will be delivered by Zoom. Drop Marette an email if you’re able to help.