Enterprise Culture in Sheffield

So one of the things that we are very keen to foster in Sheffield in the longer term is what I would describe as an enterprise culture. You know enterprise and entrepreneurship is flowing through the veins of all our citizens, students and universities. The challenge with that comes probably from post-industrial feature of cities like Sheffield, where back in the 1960s and 70s the landscape was dominated by a small number of big employers in a big steel companies, the coal industry and lots of people working for somebody else.

So rather than being entrepreneurial they were working for a boss who dictated what they up was. That was probably complicated and added to in the 1970s in the UK were many major industries were nationalized. So they became government owned so it was almost another layer of bureaucracy and moving people further away from the sharp end of understanding what the business was all about.

I think one of our challenges here in recent times has been to set and recalibrate things and get people thinking in an enterprising way again, to think about what the possibilities are, what the future might hold. One of the reasons we created the Made Festival which is now the U.K.'s most exciting festival of enterprise and entrepreneurship, was really to raise aspiration amongst everyone in the city to make them think about the art of possible and not to sort of diminish their dreams from an early age. To open their minds to the world of possibilities and create new businesses, new ideas, new opportunities for Sheffield and have lots of smaller and medium sized creative businesses contributing towards our economy, rather than relying on bigger players.

CultureFighter

Enterprise Culture in Sheffield

Brendan Moffett

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