This year, Global Entrepreneurship Week celebrates its 10th anniversary as does the Institute of Directors Young Directors Forum.
This milestone provides a chance to celebrate the last 10 years of entrepreneurship.
But what is in store for entrepreneurs over the next ten years?
When thinking of challenges to startups over the next 10 years Brexit is often at the forefront of debates.
A poll by Survation and the Mail on Sunday suggests 69 per cent of the British public oppose the Prime Minister’s ‘Hard Brexit’ approach and 53 per cent now back a second referendum.
The last general election saw the British public turning against the hardline Brexit approach, and Prime Minister Theresa May’s spurious rhetoric of “Brexit means Brexit”. The vast majority of business leaders that I speak to – and virtually all students and young people that I meet – do not want Brexit to happen.
This supports what I have been saying all along, since the 24th June 2016, that Brexit might never happen.
With the horizon filled with uncertainty, the challenge of Brexit still freezes the nation’s progress and growth. Businesses are very worried for the future.
When I came to this country as an international student in the early 1980s, the UK was the sick man of Europe. No one wants to go back to the bad old days of the 1970s, when entrepreneurship was frowned upon.
And there is no appetite to reverse the globalisation that has benefited our increasingly open and global country – a country which, six months before the EU referendum was announced on 23rd February 2016, boasted the fastest-growing economy in the G7.
We have benefited from ever-increasing globalisation and an increasingly integrated and interdependent global economy since the 1980s. Despite Brexit, there is a huge amount of support for continuing to build ties all over the world, including with India, which still pursues closer global partnership around the world.
Globalisation has advanced so far, even within the lifetime of some of the youngest entrepreneurs today. The internet and communications now play a huge role in global business and, for the first time ever, there are five billion people around the world with mobile phones.
International business travel is set to vastly increase in the coming years – the civil aviation industry worldwide is expected to double its fleet of aircraft in the next two decades – and this will have an enormous impact on the way business is done.
It will become increasingly important for entrepreneurs to consider the opportunities for innovation, creativity and collaboration, provided by the huge variety of international partners and global markets to which they have access.
For the UK, there is no doubt there will be uncertainty and serious economic costs over the coming years owing to the Brexit vote.
I have always told business audiences I speak to that they ought to think global from day one – Cobra Beer is sold in over 40 countries worldwide, including virtually every country in the EU – and Brexit presents a huge obstacle to this.
The threat of crashing out of the EU without a deal is a grave threat and the prospect of paying extortionate World Trade Organisation trade tariffs and non-tariff barriers holding up goods at borders are hugely discouraging, particularly given the hardline Brexiteers absurd claim that ‘No deal is better than a bad deal’.
Many of those Brexiteers have no experience of running a business. Starting a business is one of the most challenging things you will ever do.
If there is one characteristic that unites all entrepreneurs, it is guts. That is why entrepreneurs are not afraid of making their voices heard.
They are optimists who are not afraid of taking risks, even in difficult climates.
The future of business finance holds some hope. Financing was the first major hurdle for Cobra and, with a student debt to pay off, we had to raise every small bit of money piecemeal from a variety of different sources.
There is still a large funding gap for small businesses and startups, compared with large businesses in the UK – part of a $2 trillion gap globally between small businesses’ demands and what financial institutions are willing to pay, according to the SME Finance Forum.
The UK is leading the way to create innovative platforms for business finance – including peer-to-peer funding, equity-based crowdfunding and asset finance. Innovative finance solutions will gradually close this business funding gap left by traditional forms of finance such as bank loans.
Another area where entrepreneurship is attracting more attention is enterprise education. Today, entrepreneurship is at the heart of just about every British university. I always advise entrepreneurs not to give up on their education, because they will take it with them for the rest of their career.
I personally am committed to lifelong education as a graduate of a number of business schools, including the President’s Leadership Programme at the Harvard Business School. I would encourage students to pursue their studies and build their connections at university with just as much vigour as they would pursue their own business ventures.
Outside of university, too, we have woken up as a country to entrepreneurship and I believe this will only grow over the next 10 years.
Although the next few years may see many parts of the world gripped by uncertainty, in spite of this the growth of technology and increase in global connectedness mean that the next ten years will present even more opportunities for entrepreneurs than the last.