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The 20 most promising ideas that are submitted to the iDEA
scheme will receive a £5,000 grant. These participants will
also have the support from a mentor as, in a recent survey
completed by young people, having a mentor has been seen as a key
to success, alongside taking part in a business placement. Just
three finalists will be selected for the 2014 iDEA Award, which
comes with £15,000 of funding.
A recent study from Unltd found that 55% of 16 to 25-year-olds
would like to set up their own business, and yet only 14% are in
the process of doing so. With these figures in mind, the aim for
the iDEA scheme is to get 1,000,000 young people involved in the
programme over the next 5 years.
With his new scheme, the 54-year-old Duke of York has sent the
message to young people to try to get involved in
business, but he has also highlighted his belief that “failure
is good for children”.
Prince Andrew told The Sunday Times that he learnt to not
be afraid of failing during his time at Gordonstoun, the Scottish
boarding school that his father and brothers attended. He
particularly recalls the time that the young Prince was tasked
with negotiating a rowing boat out of a harbour without
crashing it!
The Duke stated that: “So much of life is understanding about
failure and the lessons to be learnt from failure […] Failure
allows you to succeed in the future because we are an
experience-based learning organism. All animals are. Give someone
the experience and they will learn”.
Annika Small, Chief Executive of Nominet Trust, said: “Digital
technology has fundamentally changed the nature of
entrepreneurship, opening up new opportunities for young people to
create businesses. However, much of the support currently available
to young entrepreneurs is desperately out of sync with their
needs”.
She continued by saying: “From working with young people, it is
clear they are looking for small-scale support that allows agile
and iterative development, building and testing prototypes before
going to market”. Small also highlighted how many young people are
reluctant to take out a loan to support their fledgling idea, and
prefer to “bootstrap” their way through in the initial stages.
Lack of support and guidance of a mentor is a key issue for 83% of
youths, and more than half who took part in a survey said they
thought it would be difficult to find someone to mentor them, which
would make beginning their own business even more difficult. It is
statistics like these that have prompted Prince Andrew to initiate
such a programme for young people, which is based on his father’s
Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme.
The new initiative is supported by three famous entrepreneurs:
Michael Acton-Smith, founder of Mind Candy (who created Moshi
Monsters), Lily Cole, model and creator of ‘impossible.com’,
and Nick D’Aloisio, teen founder of the news summary app,
‘Summly’.
The Summly founder praised the new scheme supported by the Duke of
York, saying: “What young people need, above all, is the
support and advice that can get them into the mindset of becoming
an entrepreneur. That’s what doesn’t get widely taught […] It is
about not just how to do things, but what you can do with them. It
can inspire young people to fulfil their potential and create the
businesses of the future”.
Model Lily Cole also said she recognises “how valuable support
systems are for fostering creativity in this space”, since she has
experienced the difficulties of starting a business. Other
celebrities, such as singer and music producer Will.i.am, have also
agreed to be involved with Prince Andrew’s initiative, and will
soon be handing out badges of recognition for the three-stage
programme, called Open Badges. This programme was set up through a
partnership with Digital ME.
The Duke of York is also patron of The Peter Jones Foundation,
an organisation set up to encourage youths to go into business and
entrepreneurship. Alongside this, he is also patron of
the London Metropolitan University’s business start-up
programme, and the School for Creative Start-Ups, just to name but
a few. The Duke’s website states that he “supports providers of
entrepreneurially focused education”, and the iDEA pilot scheme
makes such schemes one step further, by providing funding to make
dreams into a reality.
photo credit: York Labour via photopin cc]]>
