Simon Best

Middlesex University, London, UK

Title: I Believe… From aspirational to realistic

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Biography

Simon Best is a Senior Lecturer at Middlesex University Business School.  He is the Programme Leader for the M.Sc. Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship and the Project Leader of EDH@MDX the enterprise development hub, supporting students start low investment businesses.  He was the project lead for APInno, SBeA and InHeriT, three Erasmus funded projects.  Alongside these roles, Simon is a Teaching Fellow.

Simon has been involved in entrepreneurship on a global scale.  Over a period of 30 years he has started businesses in India, Viet Nam, Papua New Guinea and Australia.  Simon has also been a consultant to small and medium businesses in Japan, Taiwan, India, South Africa and Viet Nam.  More recently he has been delivering workshops and seminars on entrepreneurship in Kyrgyzstan; Azerbaijan, Hungary, USA, Bulgaria and Viet Nam to emerging entrepreneurs.

Abstract

There is a very large group of successful women whose stories are rarely told.  The media tends to highlight those women who become great leaders in their fields.   The intention here is not to disparage those who make it on to the big scene, but to give a voice to those who don’t but are equally as successful; it is all a matter of scale.  This is the story of three women who became successful.  All three had humble beginnings but have fundamentally change their lives because of three factors, becoming realistic, taking risks and being persistent; factors that are frequently missing from the education system and rarely considered when mentoring nascent business women.  The presentation will look at each factor as it applied to each of the women.

Using these stories, the aim is to provoke discussion about what success means and to recognised that it comes in many forms.  From this discussion, find ways of providing greater support to women in (small) business.  The vast majority of businesses are do not grow quantitatively.  Yet, they are no less as important as those that do.  At the Enterprise Development Hub in Middlesex University, we focus on developing the character of the students using a learning framework that consists of curiosity, imagination and creativity within a structure that develops grit.