ABSTRACT
To stimulate new business formation, governments around the world have sought to increase the supply of future entrepreneurs. In the UK, Enterprise Insight was established in 2004 to create a more entrepreneurial culture amongst young people. To achieve this, it developed and ran several national programmes and in 2006 it launched local initiatives (known as hubs) to run intensive local campaigns in areas with below average business birth rates and an above average proportion of economically excluded young people. This chapter describes the implementation of the hub initiatives and analyses the results of a study to estimate their impact on young people’s entrepreneurial attitudes and the creation of a more entrepreneurial culture. The hubs were found to have had positive effects. However, these largely offset what would otherwise have been a trend towards less positive entrepreneurial attitudes. It then highlights the difficulties caused for impact evaluation by continuous policy change and, even with control areas, allowing for the effects of other policies. Finally, it suggests that initiatives to increase the business birth rate via cultural change require long-term commitment and a clear definition of enterprise.
