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Turning schoolkids into entrepreneurs - sponsored by BT?

I think I shocked the group at this morning's BT-sponsored Round Table - part of Small Business Week - by suggesting that the closest most of our country's teenagers will ever get to experiencing an "enterprise culture," will be the idea of buying grass in bulk and selling it to schoolmates.

And (I suggested) this might not be altogether a bad thing.

The reasons BT is getting involved in Small Business Week are not altogether obvious, but at least part of the game is to "show we care" about IT. And that, dear reader, is the reason that you've been seeing celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey putting together a PC server with a carving knife [above, right] - it's BT showing that it cares about the small business.

But Small Business isn't just Gordon and the rest of the country's fish and chip shops. Nor is it the next bright kid with a wheeze to sell cool gamez to mobile phone users; and if we want a strategy which increases the number of startup businesses in the world, one thing it has to do is stop teaching future entrepreneurs that a job (preferably, a teaching job at a university!) is the only cool thing to do.

I particularly want to see "Business Studies" made a part of Engineering teaching.  This is something of a hobby of mine. So I welcome a chance to spread it to people who are in a position to spread the word.

Monday's BT meeting wasn't ideal. It would have been, if "Competition Minister" Stephen Timms had stayed on after his introductory comments. Timms is one of the few Cabinet Ministers I know personally, and certainly someone I'd expect to lend a sympathetic ear; alas, he was summoned by an urgent aide before the Q&A.

Today's Round Table included exactly the sort of people I'd like to be able to preach this sermon at, thankfully; people who have the ear of BT's small business group. They included "normal bigwigs" - corporate execs like Beatriz Butsana-Sita, director, BT Business; Matthew Smith, Director of Business Development, Royal Bank of Scotland. But possibly more important in this context, there were genuine small business owners like Kerrie Keeling, MD of A Woman's Touch and Dave Sumner Smith [left], ceo of  WordZone, and BT's star SME this week, Vanessa Phillips, MD of Outsec  - a sort of instant job centre for secretarial workers.

To my relief, nobody at the dinner said: "What a daft idea" and so I hope we'll work on it...

* No, not this former "IT Girl" Emma...