PROFESSOR DYLAN JONES-EVANS

On October 5th 2011, one of greatest entrepreneurs that this World has ever seen passed away in his California home at the age of 56, leaving an enormous legacy of brilliance. For those of us who study entrepreneurship, there are many who are put on pedestals as people who have changed the World around them. Josiah Wedgwood, Edwin Land, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Richard Branson and Bill Gates are all individuals who made a difference to specific industry but is there anyone who, in such a comparatively short lifetime, did more than Steve Jobs to change the way we work, play and communicate with each other? Let’s look at the evidence. In the 1970s, he created the Apple II, the World’s first personal computer, with his best friend Steve Wosniak. He then went onto to develop the Macintosh, which began the home computer revolution and created the desktop publishing industry. When he left Apple after a management dispute, he joined forces with John Lassiter at Pixar to create a wh...

Last month, we published the thirteenth edition of the Wales Fast Growth 50 (FG50) supplement, which is the only list of the fastest growing firms in Wales. There is also a UK-based list - the Virgin Fast Track 100 - that is one year older and is published in the Sunday Times. However, it  rarely features Welsh-based companies, with the vast majority being found in the South East of England. Funnily enough, having seen the Inc 500 list in the USA, I had thought of developing a national list for Ireland back in 1996 when I was working at the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business in Dublin but left before I got round to it. After I had come back to Wales to take up a chair in entrepreneurship at the University of Glamorgan, Dr Hamish Stevenson had already established the Virgin Fast Track 100 as the UK equivalent in 1997. So, I decided to concentrate on developing a list to focus attention on the growing impact of entrepreneurial firms in Wales. So is there a differe...

Earlier this year, I had honour of meeting Tiffany Schlain and her husband, Ken Goldberg, at their home in California. Honoured by Newsweek as one of the “Women Shaping the 21st Century,” Tiffany is a filmmaker, artist, founder of The Webby Awards, co-founder of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences and a Henry Crown Fellow of The Aspen Institute. Ken is Professor at Berkeley and, frankly, an incredible individual . Hopefully, we will be working with both soon. In the meantime, have a look at a preview of  Tiffany's new film on the connected world we all live "Have you ever faked a restroom trip to check your email? Slept with your laptop? Or become so overwhelmed that you just unplugged from it all?  In this funny, eye-opening, and inspiring film, director Tiffany Shlain takes audiences on an exhilarating rollercoaster ride to discover what it means to be connected in the 21st century. From founding The Webby Awards to being a passionate advocate ...

As you read this,  I will be sitting on a non-stop train between Cardiff and Paddington which is attempting to break the record for the fastest time between our capital city and London. The train left at 12.21pm and was expected to be in London before 2.00pm  - a time of around 90 minutes as compared to the normal time of over two hours. Of course, it would not be stopping at Newport, Bristol, Swindon and Reading, The reason for the journey is to demonstrate what a new electrified line could bring to Wales as the time to be taken will be roughly the same. However, I would hope that it may also give First Great Western pause for thought regarding the development of a capital express train service running both ways (one in the morning and one in the evening) which would make the journey (and communications) far easier between the two cities, given that electrification is some years away.

One of this year's Fast Growth 50 firms, the Transport Broker Group, is set to create 30 new jobs at their brand new offices over the coming months, with positions available for customer service personnel, sales team members, and team leaders. This comes a few weeks after the Transport Broker Group was named the 30th fastest growing Welsh business at the Fast Growth 50 business awards at a gala dinner in Cardiff’s Holland House Hotel. Building on its impressive growth over the last few years, the company has purchased brand offices which is double the size of their previous premises and will allow the Transport Broker Group to further expand its workforce. As a result, the Transport Broker Group is planning to double its number of employees over the course of the next 12 months, with staggered intakes of new workers over the course of the year. Fifteen new sales staff were signed up earlier this month, and another thirty vacancies have just been opened as the Transport Brok...

Finally back in Wales after four excellent days of hard graft at MIT and Harvard. At this stage, I can't divulge exactly what we discussed as the University will want to make a major announcement in the near future. However, the trailer below of a new film "Rescue " gives a taster of the sort of work that a new and exciting multi-university global centre could be working on in the very near future. Watch this space.  

With the University of Wales concluding a significant research agreement with a number of US universities this week, I was invited over to Boston to discuss the next steps forward with partners from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). My previous visits to the USA have always been out of London Heathrow with Virgin Atlantic but this time, I decided to give Aer Lingus a go. Why the Irish airline you may ask? Well, the main reason is that, in conjunction with their regional partner Aer Arran, there is a service out of Cardiff that connects to the East Coast of the USA via Dublin. There are a number of advantages to the flight, not least avoiding the three hour train journey to Heathrow followed by the two hour check in period. But it also means I can roll up at a relatively quiet Cardiff Airport around three quarters of an hour before departure, go quickly through security and start the journey relatively stress-free. The Cardiff-Dublin fl...

That's the subject of "Magic Sauce", the latest animated video from the Kauffman Foundation in the USA.  Kauffman CEO Carl Schramm points out that nearly 700,000 new businesses start every year, but the failure rate is high and many of them are not creating jobs. Schramm asks, "How do we make those firms more successful at the outset?"  Watch and enjoy.  

Yesterday, a campaign was launched to increase the number of women entrepreneurs by 100k over the next ten years. Everywoman , the largest female business community in the UK has linked up with the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB)'s Real Life Entrepreneurs Campaign to help encourage more women to set up new ventures in the UK, arguing that 150,000 start-ups would be created per year if women started businesses at the same rate as men. This is not surprising, as according to the last Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report for the UK , female early-stage entrepreneurial activity in the UK in 2010 was 4 per cent of the adult population as compared to 9 per cent for men i.e. the ratio of female to male early-stage entrepreneurial activity was 44 per cent. There were also considerable variations amongst the four home nations (see below). As well as a focus on encouraging more women, the FSB's campaign will also promote enterprise amongst young people, the over-50s...

There is a great debate going on about the state of education in Wales not only at the university level, but also at primary and secondary levels as well. As many have pointed out, there seems to be one particular country that Wales could learn from and that is Finland, the international trailblazer in the field of education. As a regular visitor to Finland for the past 15 years, I have experienced, at first hand, the high quality of university student coming through the system. Yet, it is only recently that other nations have begun to sit up and take notice of what is going on. One excellent point of reference for the so-called Finnish Way is the work of   Pasi Sahlberg . His writing and lectures on this subject are worth having a look at, such as this presentation on what a Canadian province can learn from Finland  in the field of education. Essentially, Sahlberg argues that the rest of the World is trailing Finland in five key areas of education, na...

Last week, the BBC’s Dragon’s Eye programme revealed that despite billions of pounds of European funding, West Wales and the Valleys have become poorer during the last decade. According to the programme, the latest official figures show that GDP per head in the region has fallen from 66.8 per cent of the EU average in 2000 to 64.4 per cent in 2008, the latest year for which figures are available. The only other parts of Europe to see a drop in their relative prosperity over this period are Malta, two regions of Portugal and four regions of southern Italy. Every other region that has received the highest level of European funding, including those in Greece, Latvia, Slovakia and Spain, have become wealthier over the same period. This is a shameful indictment of the use of this vital funding package to turn around the Welsh economy during the last decade. Defenders of the policies of successive Assembly Governments trot out the line that the first round of funding, known as Ob...

I am really pleased that a new article, "Entrepreneurship in Deprived Urban communities - the case of Wales "- has been accepted for publication in the Entrepreneurship Research Journal (ERJ) from the Berkeley Electronic Press. ERJ is an an international journal committed to publishing the very best scholarly research. It encourages a scholarly exchange between experts from all fields which demonstrate the vital role that entrepreneurship plays in determining the quality of lives, societies, and economies. The scope of the journal is unique in that it seeks to disseminate both theoretical and empirical evidence research that will facilitate the development of entrepreneurship as a field of study today, and in the future. A scholarly forum for new ideas that have the impact on broadening the traditional business model, the journal recognizes experts and their contributions from all fields including economics, business, psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, ...

Whilst it seems, after Saturday's enthralling quarter final in the rugby World Cup, there is very little that Ireland can teach Wales in terms of modern rugby, the same is certainly not true in terms of how to get everyone working together to revitalise an economy. On Saturday, I wrote about the sterling work of the Irish Technology Leaders Group (ITLG) and mentioned the upcoming Global Irish Economic Summit that was to take place over the weekend in Dublin Castle.  Following this prestigious event, at which former US President Bill Clinton and a host of others spoke, there are a number of recommendations that have already been announced in the last couple of days. These include: Private sector expertise - ITLG has offered to put together a group of Irish technology leaders to sit on the boards of semi-state companies without charge to help the country weather the current economic storm. They would initially offer to work for free to help run various sta...

Last week, I was delighted to be invited to Dublin for the fourth Annual “Silicon Valley Comes to Ireland” conference, organised by the Irish Technology Leaders Group’s (ITLG) . This is a regular event in which senior executives from the world’s innovation hotspot come over to Ireland to engage with more than fifty Irish technology companies in a series of private investor workshops. Earlier this summer, the University of Wales Global Academy opened an office in ITLG’s Irish Innovation Centre in San Jose , the capital city of Silicon Valley, to give Welsh firms access to the region’s investors and universities. So this was a real opportunity to catch up with John Hartnett, the President of ITLG, and see the effect that his team is having on delivering a more innovative economy. As John suggested during the event, their aim is to help Ireland focus on enlarging its indigenous high-tech sector to drive economic recovery as there is significant opportunity for growth created by ...

Yesterday evening, I received a phonecall from a good friend asking me if I had read the Sunday Times that day. I hadn't and so he directed me to a story which, if true, could have serious implications for one of the Welsh Government's flagship policies. Unfortunately, due to the Sunday Times' web policy, I cannot provide the necessary link to the story (which may be why no-one seems to have picked up the article in the Welsh press). Essentially, the story suggests that the Welsh Government will have to pay the difference in fees for thousands of EU students wishing to study at English. According to the Sunday Times, "The loophole allows Europeans to exploit a decision by the Welsh government to pay any fees above £3,465 for students from Wales who attend courses in England from next year". It would seem that under EU laws, Wales is not permitted to offer a better deal to its own students than it offers to those of any EU state outside Britain...

The last six months have been exceptionally busy on the day job, which is why I haven't been blogging as often as I should have. More relevantly, I never had any time in the evenings to look after the management of the blog itself, which is why I decided to stop accepting comments altogether in April as moderating them took so much time (and I just never got round to changing the settings back on blogger). With Welsh political coverage on the BBC being reduced, could the death and influence of the blog have been exaggerated? Fortunately, I am pleased to note that the Welsh blogosphere remains a healthy place for political, economic and social commentary on vital matters of the day. There is the Uber-blog known as WalesHome  but also blogging veterans from across the political sphere such as Glyn Davies , Valleys Mam , Borthlas ,  Peter Black and Blog Menai , all of which make a real contribution to debate and discourse. There are also newer ones who are as g...

Earlier this year, the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) put forward the suggestion that Glyndwr University should work under an umbrella of higher education institutions led by Aberystwyth and Bangor Universities. Recently, a group of MPs, led by the local Wrexham MP Ian Lucas, had objected to this proposal, suggesting that HEFCW had “displayed a woeful ignorance of the needs of north-east Wales and the importance of a university led from within our region”.  They were supported last week by Flintshire County Council , which noted that the move could be potentially damaging for the region as the university has built strong links with the business community. I am not surprised that there is growing sympathy for Glyndwr University’s current dilemma. With Wrexham and Flintshire being very much one of powerhouse regions of the Welsh economy, one would have thought that the Welsh Government would have seen the development of Glyndwr University as a key part o...

WESTERN MAIL COLUMN 1ST OCTOBER 2011 Earlier this month, I was invited to a conference exploring the importance of Cardiff to the Welsh economy. Entitled ‘Serving Wales – Building a Capital and Prosperous Wales’ and organised by the Cardiff Business Partnership, the event included contributions from the First Minister and David Stevens, chief executive officer of Admiral PLC. It was a timely conference, coming a week and a half before the announcement of the Welsh Government’s strategy for the next five years, a strategy dubbed as a roadmap for the Welsh economy by Carwyn Jones but as "meaningless" and too vague by Opposition leaders. Certainly, there is little, beyond the Welsh Jobs Fund that employers can point to as being of any direct impact from the five year plan, and that will only create 4,000 six month long placements for young people rather than any meaningful long term employment. Perhaps the main problem with the Government’s plan is that it l...