A great start to GEW UK 2011 and although I have been enjoying the National Health Service experience today by proxy, I did get a chance to have a limited browse at the Government’s contribution on launch day. At last we seem to have a coherent enterprise promotion strategy developing and that alone is worth celebrating.

First, the Enterprise Village has been launched in support of enterprise education in schools and colleges from primary to further education. The website is visually appealing
and easy to navigate but just how useful for both students and teachers remains to be seen. It does seem to have taken the best of the Teacher.net enterprise education pages and made them more user-friendly. When you dig beneath the surface a little, it still looks very much like a government website but as with all my comments here today they are a little superficial.

Then we move on to the Businesslink.gov contribution, with the launch of “My
New Business” and “The Growth and Improvement Service”.  In many respects there is a huge improvement in the way these online services look and feel, compared to the old Businesslink.gov approach. “My New Business” is again easy to navigate and at first glance seems to cover all the main start-up questions. There is a lot of advice and support accessible from this site and its partner site for businesses that want to grow. Both sites have a rather patronising tone that fails to belie their origin and the “Growth and
Improvement Service” website looks a little Freudian if you abbreviate it to GIS. The stock corporate images dotted all over the latter site (in particular) are all rather late 20^th Century and give it a very dated look. I will give both a rather more in-depth assessment over the coming days but my initial impression is quite positive.

My biggest cheer is saved for the renewed government commitment to the Premier League
Enterprise Academies programme. This initiative has huge potential and in my opinion the Government is right to get behind it. A small but impressive team of individuals at the Premier League and at the participating clubs had already taken the core enterprise education programme (developed by Middlesbrough F.C. Enterprise Academy), proved its suitability for use at other clubs, and developed further tailor made enterprise activity that meets the needs of local schools and communities. The academies are working towards
sustainable business models and need, literally, the smallest of support from the Government to roll the programme out to all Premier League and former Premier League club community programmes. I’ll say more on this initiative also, at a later date.

So, a good effort from the Government to get us started but for me, GEW starts today at the Go Global conference on the Southbank.