Creating the environment where enterprise flourishes

Small Business Advocates Promote Entrepreneurship

Hector Barreto, SBA Administrator in the United States, and Martin Wyn Griffith, chief executive of the U.K.’s Small Business Service (the British equivalent of the SBA) came together at the Kauffman Foundation to talk about government efforts to promote entrepreneurship.

For Barreto, the appearance was a return to Kansas City where his first experience in the world of entrepreneurship began at a young age. He helped his parents by working in, and later co-managing, a family restaurant, an export/import business, and a construction company in his home town of Kansas City, Missouri.

Wyn Griffith highlighted the United Kingdom’s efforts to promote the values of entrepreneurship, especially to its young people. He discussed the U.K.’s first National Enterprise Week and outlined its seven-point strategy to foster entrepreneurship:

* Develop better regulation and policy

* Improve small businesses’ experiences of government services

* Encourage more enterprise in disadvantaged communities

* Improve access to finance

* Build the capacity for small business growth

* Encourage a dynamic startup market

* Build an enterprise culture

In November 2004 during the U.K.’s National Enterprise Week, Kauffman Foundation President and CEO Carl Schramm was an invited guest of the British government serving as a keynote speaker. Enterprise Week brought together hundreds of organizations from every region and nation of the U.K. to offer inspiration and practical advice, and celebrate enterprise in all its forms from business start-ups, nonprofit social enterprise, and education.

Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown discussed the Kauffman Foundation at the event, describing the key role it plays in stimulating the American economy though its work to advance entrepreneurship. Brown told the audience that the U.K. would look to leaders in the U.S. to learn more about the American entrepreneurial experience.

Find out more and watch video highlights of presentations by Barreto and Wyn Griffith http://www.kauffman.org/items.cfm/614