From the New Zealand Trade and Enterprise website
The Enterprise Culture and Skills Activities (ECSA) Fund is designed to support the development of a culture of enterprise and business success in New Zealand.
It is an annual contestable fund for projects that aim to develop enterprising skills and attitudes among New Zealanders. This includes seed funding and piloting new and innovative approaches. Young people are a specific target of this fund. [my highlights]
There is 1.5 million bucks up for grabs each year. Not all of it was claimed last year (2007) due to a “significant number of the project applications received fell short of being able to deliver a cross curricula enterprise approach. A cross curricula approach is defined as teachers embedding enterprise in more than one curricular area, incorporating authentic learning by involving business and the community.”
One group that won some funding from this fund last year sounds really interesting. [Te Kaihau Ltd] They are developing a programme linking up Vic uni 3rd year Marketing and International Business students with students from universities overseas, to link export-ready industry clients to markets here and in the partner country/s.
They also have a ‘Da Vincis’ project aiming to extract some of the potential from ADHD kids. Apparently ADHD kids are 4 times as likely to become entrepreneurs. Their characteristics are also a ‘mirror image of the behaviour characteristics common to most successful entrepreneurs, artists and actors, and probably 100% of all comedians”. Part of this programme teams up with an NZ company selling meditation online to the world, which has also been trialled with great success in decile 1-10 NZ schools. “Teachers claim bullying has virtually disappeared and student learning has significantly improved”.
They also have the Global Enterprise Experience project. This contest links four pairs of participants from diverse countries to develop a business concept proposal. Teams communicate via the web.
The participants have 3 weeks to develop a business concept proposal on a profitable product or service that meets the needs of the poor. It ran in 2008 with 465 participants from 32 countries.
