E-Magazine
Jackie Brierton MBE
Director, WECOE and YPECOE
Recent research, including GEM, has indicated that enterprise activity in the West Midlands is below the national average, and that there are particular gaps among women, young people and minority ethnic communities. That’s why Advantage West Midlands (AWM), the Regional Development Agency, is committed to developing inclusive enterprise policy and activities which encourage a more diverse business base across the region. In order to address low levels of entrepreneurship and, ultimately, decrease the productivity gap, AWM has created four Centres of Expertise (COE) focused on women’s enterprise, minority ethnic enterprise, young people’s enterprise and social enterprise.
The four COEs have been designed as strategic bodies to influence policy and service delivery and don’t directly provide business support. Each centre is designed slightly differently based on its target group, however they have a similar approach to stimulating enterprise which includes:
Developing market intelligence and building an evidence base
Supply side analysis and capacity building
Stakeholder engagement
Acting as a “critical friend” in evaluating the support being given by Business Link and other business support providers
Identifying gaps and developing new pilot activity
The Women’s Enterprise Centre of Expertise (WECOE), in partnership with Prowess, was the first COE to begin delivering activity in March 2008. To enable WECOE to develop a robust enterprise support model for women in the region it has been designed around five key success factors:
Establishing the economic case for supporting women's enterprise in the region
Stimulating enterprise culture within the region
Ensuring that mainstream business support agencies accept the need for specialist business support to women as part of funded core provision.
Ensuring that agencies delivering business support to women (both mainstream and specialist) attain or commit to achieving the Prowess Flagship Award.
Developing a sustainable model to ensure that women’s enterprise remains at the forefront of government policy beyond 2009.
Since WECOE’s inception, there have been a number of economic and policy developments which have shaped its development. In the 2008 budget, the government pledged greater support for women’s enterprise in the Enterprise Strategy through a variety of measures including piloting Women’s Business Centres, developing enterprise services using Children’s Centres, forming a mentoring network, developing a £12.5m capital fund for women-led business and establishing a national policy and research centre. As a direct response to this, WECOE partnered with the Women’s Business Development Agency (WBDA), Business Link West Midlands and other key enterprise providers to develop a virtual West Midlands Women’s Business Centre and is currently working on securing funding to expand the Centre and to develop enterprise support through Children’s Centres in the region.
Its capacity-building activity has included providing bursaries for women seeking SFEDI accreditation as business advisors, leadership workshops and workshops for business support providers on quality standards and improved services and marketing to women.
WECOE has also been responsive to the impact of the current recession on women-owned businesses, and following a regional report and survey has developed recommendations for how AWM could better address the needs of female entrepreneurs and potential entrepreneurs. Alongside this, WECOE has influenced the collection and use of disaggregated data sets to improve the evidence base for supporting women’s enterprise.
In WECOE’s interim evaluation the project was assessed for its Strategic Added Value indicating impact in a variety of areas:
Additionality and strategic influence: the ‘policy innovation’ of the COEs themselves is generating additionality and providing a source of genuine joined-up thinking on enterprise strategy for under-represented groups for the first time.
Engagement: stakeholders verified that they were seeing evidence of WECOE stimulating engagement with those previously not engaged.
Synergy: Action Learning Process between the COEs creating synergy and more effective co-working, which aims to reduce duplication and contribute to COE legacy.
Strategic Leadership & Catalyst: stakeholder events and ongoing presence in the women’s enterprise community have been effectively used as a mechanism for raising issues, needs and development opportunities direct from ‘grass roots’ level. Regional intelligence is being gathered continually with WECOE feeding into strategies from a growing evidence base.
Currently numerous joint activities are taking place between the COEs in a variety of areas including:
Influencing and commissioning disaggregated data/research
Influencing monitoring/evaluation of business support activity
Acting as a critical friend and active partner to Business Link
Joint funding of a field worker to advance innovative approaches to diversity and entrepreneurship by facilitating an action-based learning process to track joint working, project collaboration, monitoring and evaluation of the strategic added value of COE activities.
Raising awareness of supplier diversity and procurement issues
Joint networking activities which connect specialist structures with a view to collaborative working and consortia activity
From a practical perspective, the COEs offer a flexible and targeted resource for the development of enterprise in the region. The original specifications for their operations were of course designed long before the current economic downturn took effect, and their operational plans have had to be responsive to changing circumstances. Although it’s too early to properly measure their impact, the advantage to the RDA in having a dedicated but ‘arms-length’ resource to influence strategic thinking and enterprise policy development, linking with a wider range of stakeholders and regional partners, seems evident.
A unique feature of the COEs is that, through a tendering process, each is connected to very different types of organisation. So while WECOE is managed through the national organisation for the promotion of women’s enterprise (Prowess), the minority ethnic enterprise COE is contracted through the Centre for Research in Minority Ethnic Entrepreneurship (CRÈME) at De Montfort University, led by Professor Monder Ram. The Young Person’s Enterprise COE (YPECOE) is managed by Coventry and Warwickshire Chamber of Commerce (with personal support from its CEO, Louise Bennett) and the Social Enterprise COE is run by Social Enterprise West Midlands, led by Kevin Maton.
For further information on the Centres of Expertise, contact Melissa Dreyling, Research & Evaluation Manager, WECOE.
m.dreyling@prowess.org.uk
tel: 0121 224 7830