The Professor and the Pirate

This week, as Global Entrepreneurship Week 2020 unfolds, a new ship ‘The Harmonious Entrepreneurship Society’ was launched. Its destination clear – a planet that is in harmony, and its course is via entrepreneurship and the principles of holistic systems thinking.

For entrepreneurship to address the sustainability challenge, three recent approaches to entrepreneurship (eco, humane and social) have been added to the traditional wealth creation or economic approach. All four approaches are important. Harmonious entrepreneurship, based on systems thinking, recognises the inter-connectivity of the ecosystem and integrates all four, creating a 21st century business model intended to save our planet.

With shared captaincy with Professor David A Kirby, I hope to put my Educational Pirate skills to good use at the ‘Harmonious Entrepreneurship Society’. Here we aims to skilfully circumnavigate and integrate all approaches in accordance with Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, which requires a conjoined focus on all connected elements, rather than separate address, as has been the case traditionally.

The Society is looking to recruit an integrated, inter-generational, inter-cultural and inter-disciplinary crew, recruited for their values and entrepreneurial mindset and competences. A crew that will help “steer” the vessel with the determination, vigour and resilience of the Golden Age change agents addressing the complicated, the uncomfortable and the unjust and embracing social, cultural, environmental and economic value creation.

Onboard activities will include:

• Support for educators to facilitate ‘Harmonious Entrepreneurship.’
• Training for young adults with the knowledge, competences and skills to launch a Harmonious Entrepreneurial venture
• Research into ‘Harmonious Entrepreneurship’ and the outcomes resulting from its application
• The dissemination of research findings and best practice through publication and conference presentations

If the journey excites you and you feel, like HRH The Prince of Wales, that the ‘ environmental and social problems that now loom large on our horizon cannot be solved by carrying on with the very approach that has caused them”. Then look us up at https://harmonious-entrepreneurship.org/ 

As innovator, author and multi-award winning serial social entrepreneur Sam Coniff Allende says in “Be More Pirate”(2018) “Pirates were the millennials of the 1700s…they rewrote the rules towards fairness and social innovation and successfully countered the exploitation that was all around them. They were real agents of change”.

If you’re an agent of change, we won’t repel boarders but pipe you onboard!

David & Felicity

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