Encouraging innovative behaviour in young people

Professor Elizabeth Chell has pioneered the study of entrepreneurial behaviour and the entrepreneurial personality over the course of her career, and her latest project involves researching innovative characteristics of young people.

The entrepreneurial approach to academia

Over the last 20 years, entrepreneurship has emerged as an important area of academic research and practice. Getting any new academic discipline on to the agenda presents challenges, so Elizabeth and other academics, who have led the way in this field, have had to utilise some degree of entrepreneurial flair.

Elizabeth's approach has been to identify opportunities for building momentum by harnessing the support of groups such as the small business fraternity and the British Academy of Management, for example, and by taking advantage of government enterprise initiatives in the late 1990s, which provided a funding source for universities working in this area.

While Elizabeth doesn't describe herself as an entrepreneur, she has a deep understanding of entrepreneurial behaviour and says that there's a clear role for 'academic entrepreneurs'.

She says: "There are opportunities to be entrepreneurial as an academic and it makes sense to take advantage of these whenever possible. You need to stand out from the crowd when it comes to grant applications and securing funding, and there are more avenues to exploit your own intellectual property."

Further examples of Elizabeth's own entrepreneurial streak are found in the key role she played in the creation of two academic centres of excellence - the Institute for Entrepreneurship at the University of Southampton and the Science Enterprise Centre at the University of Manchester.

With the growing interest in entrepreneurship, Routledge/Psychology Press are publishing a new edition of Elizabeth's acclaimed book, The Entrepreneurial Personality: A Social Construction, which was first published by Routledge in 1991.

She explains the original context to the book: "Throughout the 1980s lots of people were putting forward their views on what makes a good entrepreneur, but all we had were individual, fragmented perspectives.

"Through carrying out interviews with entrepreneurs, I found that rather than there being a set of innate 'entrepreneurial characteristics', the personality traits that are shared by these people flow from behaviour that's driven by our economic and business framework, and the culture and personal situations that these people found themselves in."

In other words, if the UK creates the right educational environment to encourage and support the entrepreneurial efforts of its young people from the earliest age, many more of us can be entrepreneurs and bring an enterprising approach to our work and lives.

To create such an environment for our young people, we need to know more about how they develop entrepreneurial qualities - and what kinds of changes could have a positive impact.

Elizabeth's research for NESTA offers an opportunity to identify and measure the entrepreneurial qualities of young people - a crucial first step in developing the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.

Encouraging innovative behaviour in young people

Elizabeth's research involves identifying and measuring innovative characteristics among students in four types of secondary school: city academies, sixth form colleges, specialist schools in the arts; and specialist schools in science and technology.

While in theory there should be no difference in the proportion of students with innovative capability across these different settings, the research team expect to find that learning context and the way in which the curriculum is delivered will affect how innovative behaviour is expressed.

When it comes to innovative behaviour in this age group, Elizabeth says it's a question of identifying and nurturing potential. "Some students may already be running enterprises outside of school, but in general it's about having the ability to think creatively and spot opportunities, rather than turning them into actual enterprises.

"The national curriculum can put a squeeze on creative expression and this places quite a demand on teachers to develop formats for drawing out creative potential from their students during lessons."

Preparing students for an entrepreneurial future

Other characteristics that Elizabeth considers essential to entrepreneurial behaviour are self-confidence and self-expression.

"Having a strong belief in yourself and feeling free to express your ideas are vital if you're going to go on to be adventurous, and consider setting up a business or social enterprise.

"Debating and exploring serious and pressing issues like climate change and obesity - inside or outside of school - can be a good way of fostering these characteristics in school."

She highlights the fact that not all learning has to take place inside the classroom, and that parents as well as teachers should make the most of opportunities for pupils to develop innovative behaviour through extracurricular activities.

Elizabeth says that as well as preparing young people for success in the world of work, there's also a strong social and economic impetus for entrepreneurial behaviour:

"If the UK is to hold its head up high and maintain a strong position in a global society, we need to realise that invention alone is not enough - we also need to exploit every opportunity for innovative behaviour that we can."