Flair flourishes among our budding entrepreneurs, but are we doing enough to nurture their talent and keep Britain competitive?

Scientists across the globe are being given a stronger chance of getting their projects off the ground through grants from the Grand Challenges initiative, run by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Eighty recipients will qualify for initial sums of £65,000 to help them in a quest to make world-changing discoveries. As Tachi Yamada, president of the foundation's Global Health programme, said last month: "We really believe that true innovation is needed. Some of the ideas might seem crazy, but there is a fine line between crazy and absolutely novel."

Britain, too, is keen to champion its pioneering tradition. In this European Year of Creativity and Innovation, the government claims in its Annual Innovation Report (2008) that it is committed to making the UK "the best place in the world to run an innovative business". To achieve this, it will focus investment in areas where Britain has strength and potential competitive advantage. The Department of Health, for example, is providing £220m through regional health authorities to support front-line NHS staff with novel ideas.

A lot of expectation rests on the shoulders of youth, who are our future workers, entrepreneurs and creators of industries. But are they getting enough support to nurture their talent? Will they have the right mix of skills to ensure the nation is as innovative and competitive as possible? And do they understand how important innovation is to Great Britain plc? A handful of organisations are making it their business to find out.
The Intellectual Property Office, alongside Aardman Animations, is supporting the Science Museum's £2.1m interactive exhibition, Wallace & Gromit Present A World of Cracking Ideas. Conscious that small businesses are not extracting enough value from their intellectual property (it reckons around 90 per cent do not properly identify and manage their IP), the IPO is trying to influence the mindset of the next generation.

The exhibition attempts to inspire flair and creativity among young people. But, crucially, it also teaches them how to protect their ideas through patents, trademarks, designs and copyright.

Without great ideas and bold vision, said Aardman co-founder David Sproxton at the launch, "there isn't much of a future". He continued: "We're going to need some pretty smart ideas over the next few decades, so we need to develop those thinking and problem-solving skills in young people right now."

Lawrence Smith-Higgins, head of business outreach and education at the IPO, agrees that we do need more creators and innovators. But if young directors don't understand that what they create they own, then initiatives to encourage and inspire budding innovators will be pointless. "If they want to make a commercial success of their ideas, they've got to discover which protection is appropriate," says Smith-Higgins, who is confident the UK has "an army of innovators and creators who will see us through into the next generation and the generation after that".

When you provide the right sort of support, most young people have a talent of one sort. It's a matter of helping them uncover it, says Benedict Arora, director of NESTA's Future Innovators Programme, which explores ways to realise young people's potential to innovate in business, public services and in the community. It's important to foster innovation among the young, he adds, because whether it's global warming, technology change or the ageing population, the responses to those challenges, as well as the opportunities they present, will require inventiveness in significant ways.

"Our view is that innovation is wider than just the enterprise agenda," says Arora. "It can be anything from something like a small process improvement through to the classic inventor end of the spectrum."
Emily Webb, founder of Oarsome Potential, doesn't think of herself as an innovator, but she fits into Arora's "classic inventor" category. When she was 16, Webb designed an add-on for conventional rowing oar handles (now patented and called the Oarsome Revolver) for her GCSE design technology project. "My brief was to solve a problem within my sport," she says. "I've been a competitive rower for the last six years and, for me, the obvious problem was blisters."

Now studying business management at Exeter University in preparation to run her own business, she says she sought counsel from the internet community, as well as the British Female Inventors & Innovators Network, and would recommend up-and-coming entrepreneurs to do the same.

The 20-year old can't thank the Wales Innovators Network enough for the last three years of assistance, describing its input as "absolutely brilliant". Now ready to go to market with her product, she continues: "They provided us with a business adviser and funding as well. I don't think I'd have got this far as quickly or easily without their advice. I'm always prepared to seek other people's opinions. I don't run headlong into anything. These people know what they're talking about."

Piers Daniell had a less positive experience, but that didn't quash his determination to shake up the telecommunications industry, which had traditionally been dominated by the big players. Now leading a £3m turnover telecoms business, Fluidata, he says that when he needed seed capital as a young director in 2004, investors, along with his regional development agency, bamboozled him. He explains: "The process was so complex—to find anybody to talk to, to provide assistance—that I found it easier to go through friends and family."

Business support organisations are also loath to take on risk, claims Daniell, 27. "The most I could get at the time through The Prince's Trust, for example, was £5,000, but you can't start a business with that," he says. "There are too many costs involved, especially with what I was trying to do with technology."

To prevent innovative young businesses falling at the first hurdle, UK investors should follow America's lead, says Daniell. Take a punt on an individual; understand that some start-ups fail; and new and disruptive ideas are born out of taking risks. "There is risk, that's the point, and in America the consensus is that if you've failed a couple of times, you're a good investment."

Perhaps there's more urgency from the UK government these days to give young people the necessary skills, attitude and experiential learning that underpin innovation. Certainly, Arora at NESTA understands how serious it could be for this country if our youngsters don't rise to the challenge. "We're talking about the whole human capital that we've got in this country that needs to be optimised," he says. "We can't afford just to focus on the very gifted or the lone innovator, that's not a viable model for putting the UK economy on a successful path for the future." We will be a poorer society, both financially and in other ways, he says, if we don't push the innovation agenda.

For his part, Tom Hadfield, who sits on NESTA's Innovation Programmes Committee, is encouraged by what he sees. As a young innovator, Hadfield has pedigree. He started sports internet company soccernet.com at the age of 12—"that's the least remarkable part of it, loads of kids sit in their bedrooms and build websites"—and eventually sold his business to US sports network ESPN for $40m. His investors, he stresses, received most of that sum. After that, he and his father raised £5.7m from venture capitalists to start up online education business schoolsnet.com.

"Being entrepreneurial was my alternative to university," he says from America, where's he's been studying at Harvard. "I got to travel, meet lots of interesting people. That was my educational experience."

Today, the 26-year old reckons, there is as good a chance as ever for young people to realise their dreams. "The world has changed; support networks are transformed. They have access to everything at the click of a button," he says. Meanwhile, at NESTA, young people influence strategy and initiatives. "The organisation believes in youth-led innovation. It's not about adults sitting in a room and handing over resources. Young people have a voice."

We have every reason to believe in young people, says Hadfield, who is contemplating an MBA in the US next year. The reason? "Because young people have a 'do anything' attitude; they don't know that it's not possible. There's no fear of failure. And younger entrepreneurs have the luxury of fewer responsibilities." Their naivety, he says, means they'll try anything.

For the sake of the UK's global competitiveness, and those businesses grappling with the talent crunch, particularly in science, technology and engineering, let's hope he's right.