Business and Management - OU Community Online

The annual competition, created by Find Invest Grow and sponsored by the RBS Group, offers a unique online platform for students to road-test their business ideas while building the framework for a professional business plan at the same time.

The competition is open to all OU students and graduates of the past five years:  you don’t have to be an economics graduate or have any business experience to enter. The platform enables students to explore the viability of their business idea by asking the right questions and building the appropriate framework.

Investors will be reviewing and judging entrants to decide on the 20 semi-finalists who will be selected to attend the training workshops. The 10 finalists will be pitching their business ideas to a room full of investors, with the chance to win prizes of £25,000, £10,000, and £5,000.

The competition is now open at the RBS Enterprisingu website, where you can also see the case studies of last year's finalists and the winning idea.

A new report from the OU suggests that there is considerable support amongst small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) for the UK Government’s proposed British Business Bank.

When asked 'Would an institution like the proposed British Business Bank be likely to help firms in your industry to increase the amount they invest in their business?', almost half of respondents (48 per cent) agreed, while 30 per cent disagreed and 22 per cent were unsure.

Levels of support for this new institution were also found to be broadly similar across firms of different sizes. The study, which was sponsored by the Finance and Leasing Association, also asked SME owners and managers what they saw as the bank’s key priorities.

The most commonly identified task was ensuring adequate access to finance during economic downturns (64 per cent of respondents), closely followed by improving access to longer-term finance, such as 10 year loans (60 per cent), and providing Government support so that commercial providers can lend more easily or more cheaply (59 per cent). 

Dr Richard Blundel, of The Open University Business School, commented: "These early findings indicate suggest that many SMEs are positive about Vince Cable's plan to create a new institution to complement existing finance providers and deliver added impetus in specific areas, such as new business start-ups and long-term financing.

"Current market conditions are extremely tough for many SMEs, while the prospect of sustained economic recovery remains elusive. We may also be seeing some of these wider concerns reflected in the way that people have responded to this novel idea."

The report is available to download here.

 

Elvin Box was the inspirational presenter at the Innovation Creativity Workshop held at the prestigious Deutsche Bank offices in Frankfurt.

The event was held on the evening of Thursday, 6th September 2012.  Elvin encouraged the group, consisting of OU MBA alumni, students and guests, to think about creativity in an innovative way by encouraging audience participation.Richard Akam said “Elvin took us on a creative journey and we first looked at our own personal preferences as we built new contacts. We had to line up in alphabetical order of our first names around the room! Bit tricky in Germany where we normally use last names but we managed it!  Then we got down to discussions about KAI, about the 12 Precepts and how it all fits together with practical usage”.
 

Click here to view Elvin's slides.

By forgetting the welfare state’s consumption-boosting role, Coalition Liberals risk doing economic as well as social damage, argues Alan Shipman...

But Chancellor George Osborne insists a further round of austerity measures is needed before the next election because public borrowing is running well above the targets set in 2010. As well as continuing to reduce the range of benefits and eligibility for them, the Treasury is considering a freeze on benefit rates on the basis that most wage-earners haven’t had a real pay increase for several years.

Both coalition parties are likely to find they are embarking on an electorally slippery slope, but for contrasting reasons.
The Conservatives making a case for this freeze still tend to depict employees and benefit recipients as two distinct groups, hoping to fuel antagonism between working families (inevitably depicted as ‘hard-working’, if not employed in the public sector) and households receiving benefit (which, by implication, aren’t working hard or working at all).

While politically convenient, this distinction ignores the growing number of households that do as much paid work as they can and still depend on social benefits. Around half the UK population (30 million people) received at least one state benefit in 2010, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. While this is sometimes due to high living costs (especially linked to disability or care needs), it increasingly reflects low rates of pay, especially for jobs created during the present recession. Benefits and tax credits have become as much a subsidy to employers, or to landlords taking advantage of the chronic housing shortage, as to the households now under government fire – though it is those households that will lose from any benefit reduction.

The UK’s benefit-receiving – but hardly benefit-dependent – 50 per cent is not far from the 47 per cent that US presidential candidate Mitt Romney recently drew attention to.

As might be expected from a successful private equity investor, Romney’s arithmetic is faultless. His only mistake is to assume that all those benefit recipients are welfare-state ‘dependents’ who automatically vote for big government, when many are working hard to avoid the need for further public assistance and support the Republicans’ laissez-faire version of the American Dream.

Britain’s Liberal Democrats are missing an opportunity to deploy economic logic, as well as social fairness, against Conservative colleagues’ squeeze on social subsidies. The BBC’s recent documentary on John Maynard Keynes, which launched its exploration of three of the past century’s most influential economists, highlighted one of the insights from this great Liberal thinker that became accepted wisdom in the high-growth years of the post-war 20th century, only to be sadly forgotten in the recessionary depths of the early 21st.

Households on the lowest incomes tend to spend the highest proportion of that income, and save the least. So if governments redistribute income from richer to poorer households, aggregate demand goes up. And because that extra spending puts money into the pockets of other wage-earners who can then also spend more, national income can rise by much more than that initial injection of demand.

At times – like the present – when businesses are sitting on uninvested cash and governments are having to rein-in their deficits, that private spending boost can be vital to recovery. The magic of the ‘balanced budget multiplier’ is that, by raising the proportion of income that gets spent, output and employment can be raised without pushing the public finances further into the red.

Conversely, if benefits are cut (and if, at the same time, higher-income households are being taxed less), total expenditure falls, dragging the economy into even deeper unemployment and surplus capacity.

The coalition rejects such ‘Keynesian’ reasoning because a consumption boost appears less conducive to boosting output in the long term. It implies lower national saving, conventionally linked to lower investment and slower growth once the immediate jobs boost passes. So the government’s preferred course is to strengthen the ‘supply side’, largely through ministers competing to set up new state-funded banks. Dr Cable’s new £1bn small-business investment bank, though smaller than its promoters would have liked, has captured the momentum from Mr Clegg’s Regional Growth Fund, which has struggled to meet its initial targets for disbursement or job creation; while the Green Investment and Big Society banks still chafe under restrictive Treasury rules.

Even if they work, the problem with mobilising more funds for private investment is that few businesses will want them if demand for higher output isn’t there. Nick Clegg’s predecessors used to take pride in recalling that Keynes (who explained why market economies sometimes need a budgetary boost to regain their momentum), and William Beveridge (who showed how a comprehensive welfare state could strengthen them), hailed from the UK’s Liberal tradition, not those of British socialism. If his hold on the party, or the Liberal Democrats' role in the coalition, becomes untenable before the next election, betrayal of those great Liberals' legacy through callous and counterproductive benefit cuts will be largely to blame.

Alan Shipman is a lecturer in Economics at the Open University. He is responsible for the modules You and your money:personal finance in context and Personal investment in an uncertain world,  part of the foundation degree in Financial Services.

2 October 2012

A new two-part series of Hilary Devey’s Women at the Top starts this week looking at why the majority of top jobs are held by men.

Hilary Devey is a successful female entrepreneur who has built her own international business empire from scratch. Even though more than half of Britain’s graduates are women, and nearly half our workers are women, the vast majority of top jobs are held by men. Hilary wants to find out why.

The series, commissioned by the OU’s Open Media Unit, starts at 9pm on BBC TWO this Thursday 6 September and Jess Evans and Rosalind Searle are the OU academic consultants on the series.

OpenLearn also has extensive content in connection with the series subject areas including “Boardroom Lottery” a new interactive challenge.