This flared up last week but there’s no sense in letting a good discussion die down.
Bennie Gray, the Custard Factory and Big Peg owner, wrote a call-to-arms called ‘A challenge for Birmingham‘ which was featured in the Birmingham Post. The nub of it was that:
as we face the threat of economic meltdown, Birmingham must become the city of a thousand new opportunities – and that means unleashing our aspiring young entrepreneurs
He believes that key to this will be:
dozens of informal Custard Factory-type organisations helping to unleash the multitude of small enterprises which, given the right backing, are ready to spring forth from the garages, spare bedrooms, colleges and sheds where they have been honing their nascent skills and ideas and waiting for the right opportunity for too long
As far as support is concerned:
Only Birmingham’s politicians – in Whitehall and in City Hall – can provoke that backing and those opportunities in the manner and on the scale that is needed
In response, Coun Summerfield agreed and was:
delighted to point out that faced with the current economic conditions, we in Birmingham are already up and running to meet the challenge
(One for the journos – is it just me, or is it hard to quote politicians directly without making them sound smug?)
For his part, Mick Laverty of AWM brought up 4iP, the Aston Villa FC Enterprise Academy and Young Person’s Enterprise Centre of Expertise.
The intrepid D’log took on the ‘interesting exercise’ of searching online for info on all the schemes mentioned, playing the part of an interested inward investor. The results were sparse to say the least.