Background
What is Enterprise Week?
Enterprise Week is an annual UK-wide week of activities and events, aimed at encouraging young people to have ideas and make them happen. This can be by starting up a new business or social enterprise, or by having ideas and making them happen in the workplace.
What is Global Entrepreneurship Week?
In 2008, Enterprise Week will be part of the first ever Global Entrepreneurship Week. It's a worldwide celebration of enterprise, which aims to unleash young people’s enterprising ideas and address some of society’s biggest issues, from poverty reduction through to climate change.
What do we mean by enterprise?
We mean to have ideas and make them happen. The package of skills we use to describe enterprise are:
- creativity
- problem solving
- risk taking
- financial capability
- resourcefulness
- taking the initiative
- selling ideas.
Young people can use their enterprise skills in many areas of their life: at work, at home, or in education. All these vital skills will help young people to make their mark.
The campaign behind Enterprise Week
The Make Your Mark campaign is the national campaign to create an enterprise culture among young people in the UK by giving people in their teens and twenties the inspiration and opportunity to turn their ideas into reality.It's funded by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR).
In addition to Enterprise Week and the various ways you can get involved, Make Your Mark runs a wide variety of campaigns, projects and initiatives throughout the year – the latest are listed below.
Why run an Enterprise Week activity?
We need people and organisations to help create an environment that allows enterprising behaviour to flourish. It’s important young people believe in themselves and strive to make their ideas happen, and they often need encouragement and help.
The drive to nurture enterprise talent needs business, education, government, voluntary organisations and the media to work together – no single sector or organisation working in isolation can create opportunities on this ambitious scale.
Enterprise Week is a great opportunity for showcasing what hundreds of organisations already do all year round to help foster an enterprise culture, or alternatively to launch a new initiative or scheme. See our activities section for some great event ideas.