Enterprise Excellence 3

 

Spirit of Enterprise

This edition of Enterprise Excellence draws attention to two remarkable entrepreneurs, Lord Swaraj Paul, founder of Caparo, who recently gave a lecture at the Judge Business School, and Dr Herman Hauser, the Cambridge-based IT tycoon, serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist.

Lord Paul of Marylebone

Lord Paul of Marylebone is the Founder and Chairman of the Caparo Group. His roots are in the small Punjab town of Jalandhar in India. There his father began a small foundry making steel buckets, tubs, trunks and agricultural implements.

After graduating from Punjab University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he moved to the UK due to his daughter's need for medical treatment. He suffered the tragedy of her death in 1968 but drew strength from his loss and regards the Caparo Group as a dedication to her memory.

He was awarded the Padma Bhushan, the Indian equivalent to a British Peerage, in 1983, and received a British Peerage in 1996. His remarkable story is told in brief on the Caparo website here. In December 2007, he spoke at Judge Business School in Cambridge, in which he argued that innovation and entrepreneurship would lie at the heart of economic development in the 21st Century. Click here for a report on the lecture.

Dr Hermann Hauser

Hermann Hauser, a serial IT entrepreneur and venture capitalist, is a leading figure in Silicon Fen, the vibrant IT sector that resulted from the Cambridge Phenomenon. Amongst the companies he has founded or co-founded is Acorn Computers, through which he brought computing to the masses. He moved into venture capitalism in 1997 with the founding of Amadeus Capital Partners, which has become one of Europe's most successful VC firms.

Austrian by birth, Hermann studied for a Cambridge PhD after graduating in physics from Vienna University. He has received a clutch of awards and honorary doctorates and received a CBE for 'innovative service to the UK enterprise sector' in 2001.

Clearly Dr Hauser still takes this service seriously. The announcement has just been made that he and his wife, Dr Pamela Raspe, are giving £8 million to the University of Cambridge for the founding of a Centre for Entrepreneurship. This will house Cambridge Enterprise, the body responsible for the commercialization of University's science and technology. It will also provide space for seminars and enterprise incubation. The aim of the Centre will be to provide further stimulation of Cambridge innovation and entrepreneurship for the benefit of commerce and society. For more on this story, click here. To read a speech by Dr Hauser on 'What Makes a Good Entrepreneur', delivered at the Royal Society of Arts in London, click here.

Kenyan becomes Young Entrepreneur of the Year

A 27 year old Kenyan with six children living in a slum area with high unemployment on the outskirts of Nairobi has been named Young Entrepreneur of the Year.

The award scheme is organized by Youth Business International (YBI), an international network of programmes helping disadvantaged young people to become entrepreneurs by providing business mentoring and funds. YBI is an initiative of the International Business Leaders' Forum (IBLF), the founder-President of which is HRH The Prince of Wales.

YBI runs programmes around the world that are locally based and independent, tailored to meet the specific needs and conditions of the host countries. They aim to enable young adults to work for themselves, with the help of local business people who share their experience and provide mentoring.

The award winner, Zablon Karingi Muthaka, observed that the scarcity of official dumping sites within the residential and commercial areas of Nairobi had led to the accumulation of litter and waste products at every corner of the city. Not only did Mr Muthaka become exacerbated by the inability of the municipal authorities to address this situation, but he became concerned about environmental degradation and the health of the community.

It is what he did about this situation that won him the prize. Seeing a potential business opportunity, he conducted feasibility studies around the city to discover whether there was a market for a commercially run waste collection service. The result was Beta Bins Waste Management. The story is a reminder that there is much more to Kenya than the bad news preference of the media conveys. More...

Generating income to meet special needs

Ian Melville is the founding CEO of Info-Tec Distribution, a printing distributor with responsibility for brands including Canon, Kodak, Agfa. Here he writes about how he caught the vision for enterprise solutions to poverty and discovered it to be a transformative experience.

When I started my business in printing, graphics and design, my first objective was to provide myself and family with an income. However, as the business grew, I became increasingly aware of its wider social benefits:

        •  Producing goods and services that are of benefit to customers;
        •  Providing employment directly and stimulating employment amongst suppliers;
        •  Raising general living standards (not least through tax returns).

All this continues to inspire us. But now we are keen to achieve much more.

Last year I came across a small charity called Friends of the Handicapped International (website), which provides education to poor Ghanaian children with special needs. I discovered I could use some of the skills I've learned in business to help this school, and its former pupils and parents, to generate income through commercial activity.

We're now developing ways to make small amounts of invested capital available to such people, for the purpose of wealth-generating enterprise, not only in Ghana but also in Sri Lanka and Uganda. Seeing the huge impact ‘seed capital' can make has been a truly transformative experience, both for me and my family. Our children have come to appreciate how fortunate they are and we've gained a new sense of purpose and meaning in our business lives.

Helping to devise enterprise solutions to poverty is so much more satisfying than writing cheques to charities. To catch the vision for it there's no substitute for travelling overseas to meet people who are tackling poverty through their own entrepreneurial efforts. For me this stimulates fresh creative thinking as to how I can use business as an agent of positive social change both at home and abroad.