Steely determination: Sheffield celebrates entrepreneurship - big style!

If you've been to the Edinburgh festival, you'll know just how huge a buzz it creates around the Scottish capital. From the smallest high street shop to the largest auditorium, the whole city is taken over by a fabulous atmosphere of mirth and merriment as Edinburgh's population doubles in size from 500,000 to one million every August.

It's with that spirit in mind that MADE: The Entrepreneur Festival has been created. Taking place in venues all around Sheffield from 8-11 September, the Yorkshire city will celebrate all that's good about enterprise and the entrepreneurs behind it. A little bit of the Edinburgh festival itself will even be in town as Sunday Times enterprise editor Rachel Bridge stages her one-woman show 'How to Make a Million Before Lunch' which she performed in Scotland this year. 

BusinessZone.co.uk is also getting involved by bringing our nationwide competition The Pitch 2010 to Peter Jones' new National Enterprise Academy, which launches during MADE, giving even more entrepreneurs the chance to practice their pitch and present their venture to big name entrepreneurs. If you want to be there, find out more here. 

And finally, headlining the whole shindig is former Dragons' Den judge Doug Richard who through his School for Startups is organising a two-day boot camp to teach attendees techniques to leverage the internet to accelerate business growth, lower costs and increase profits. I've been to a few of Doug's events in the past - and spoken at one - and they are always fantastic. The former Dragon has a unique and formidable teaching style and I challenge you to leave the event having learnt nothing that could transform your business. I'll be at the boot camp on the first day and possibly the second so do say hello if you're there. 

I'm hugely looking forward to MADE and hoping that the initiative enjoys just some of the buzz that oozes throughout Edinburgh every summer. It's also great to see such an event taking place in somewhere that isn't London which is often the choice for such occasions.  

Sheffield was of course once home to a blossoming coal and steel industry but with that now in the past, the city is looking to transforming itself into, as Mike Southern recently wrote in the Financial Times, "a modern industrial centre". Let's hope MADE encourages some Sheffield residents who had never considered entrepreneurship in the past to do so and the festival in the future builds up the same backing and interest as its Edinburgh big sister.