East meets West to take on business challenges

11:25am Thursday 20th November 2008

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THE University of York is marking an international celebration of entrepreneurship by reaching across the world – both East and West.

A series of events will feature students from York joining colleagues from the United States and China in addressing challenges facing business and enterprise.

The events are part of the university’s drive to introduce the enterprise ethos into education. They coincide with Global Entrepreneurship Week which ends tomorrow. In a Business Without Borders session, students from York’s own centre for excellence in this area will join forces with counterparts from Zhejiang University to tackle two business case studies.

They will be linked by Skype and video conferencing to work on the case studies which feature business ventures in the UK and China.

Tony Ward, lead academic in the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning of Enterprise, at York, will deliver a lecture titled Great Engineering Disasters simultaneously to students in York and the University of Illinois in the US.

The lecture, delivered via video link with Dr Bruce Litchfield at the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois, will look what lessons some of the world’s great engineering failures might have for would-be entrepreneurs.

All three universities –York, Illinois and Zhejiang — are part of the Worldwide Universities Network, a partnership of 18 research-led universities in Europe, North America, China and Australia working together to promote research and teaching collaborations.

Back in York, the nationally recognised student society York Entrepreneurs will launch this year’s enterprise challenge during Global Entrepreneurship Week.

The challenge will involve refurbishing the image of traditional toys.

Representatives from toy manufacturer Hasbro will be taking part along with 29-year-old Bolton entrepreneur Imran Hakim, who recently won £140,000 of investment for his innovative new “edutainment” toy, the i-Teddy on the Dragons’ Den television programme.

Mr Ward said: “At York we aim to include enterprise in all our academic subjects.

“The Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning of Enterprise is a physical space where budding young entrepreneurs can come and work on their ideas in a free and supported environment.”

Andrew Ferguson, the university’s business, community and enterprise manager, said: “Staff and students have worked together to produce what promises to be a diverse and fascinating week for anyone with any interest in enterprise at all.

“The fact that we are to involve students in the US and China is a new and exciting development.”