What Do We Want? - The Future of Enterprise Support

It's official - the RDAs (regional development agencies) will soon be no more.

There is talk of their core replacement being something called Local Enterprise Partnerships, although, at this early stage, there is no clear definition about is meant about any of the three words defining these latest bureaucratic bodies.

- Like so much of the headline cuts across State spending, there is much momentum emerging about deconstruction, but precious little detail to date about from where productive creation is expected to come.

Cynics (or maybe just realists) amongst us might expect that the exercise could primarily end up as little more than a re-shuffle of the same grey suits into different organisational structures, with the only real cuts being the disappearance of support delivery budgets.

So let's talk more specifically about these emergent Local Enteprise Partnerships, as I fear that the voice of early stage enterprise is something that will be heard the least in the scramble for enterprise quango reassembly in new forms.

This is what I would like to see on the agenda:

1. Simple, transparent enterprise foundation grants, giving start-ups a real leg-up at the outset.

2. Everything possible to mitigate against the usual picture of enterprise agency staff and premises absorbing a high degree of money before any even gets through to businesses.

3. A removal of enterprise support duplication across multiple bodies.

4. A huge cull of inexperienced business advisors mentors and a vigorous effort to attract pro-bono mentoring support from experienced businesspeople.

5. Simple to access R&D funds, with far fewer hurdles and restrictions and a higher degree of match funding.

6. Access to cheap incubator space, ideally allied to creative, supportive and value-adding academic institutions (these are testing criteria).

7. Real consultation with real enterprises (balancing the visionary with the viable).

8. Bringing real business networks and organisations into the shaping process: this is a golden opportunity for, amongst others, the chamber of commerce movement to reassert itself against quangos, the State enteprise sector and, to some extent, academia where it has usurped chambers' local representative functions.

9. An extension and development of intern and apprenticeship incentives.

10. A major review on access to capital - a process advised by savvy and successfully entrepreneurs and NOT conceptually monopolised by the venture capital or banking industry.

- Author Malcolm Evans is a partner in corporate culture specialists The Cultureship Practice.