Wellbeing for Entrepreneurs — Innovation Pilot: interim report #1
Context
We completed our Creative Fuse North East innovation pilot back in July — a previous post sets out our original proposal. Being a side project for the three of us, although important to us all, we’ve been quiet since then.
This series of posts seeks to share the lessons we learned and what we’re planning to do next.
Intro
The first posts in this series are copied over from reports we wrote to update our sponsors and therefore are document excerpts, rather than ‘native’ blog posts.
We wrote an interim report in the Summer for one of our sponsors — the University of Sunderland. We are very grateful for their support, and in particular that of Dr. Derek Watson. The report was dated 23rd June 2018.
Brief overview of project and current status (e.g. what’s been done)
We began with a belief based on our own experiences that entrepreneurs need a space to unload, and statistics about the mental health of those who own their own businesses would agree with us.
Our query is “How can we create a peer-based structure of support that can help sustain the micro-business or entrepreneur?” The lack of support many entrepreneurs experience is a gap that networking events cannot necessarily fill.
Using action-based methods such as sociodrama (J.L Moreno), forum theatre (Augusto Boal) and The Daring Way (Brene Brown), we heard from entrepreneurs in quite small groups (2 to 3 people in each session in addition to the three facilitators) about some of the struggles balancing their businesses and other life circumstances.
Rather than content filled, the three sessions we have delivered (with a fourth to take place on 27 June) have employed structures for speaking, listening, reflecting and sharing thoughts and ideas from the group.
Main outputs (or intended if not yet complete)
- Four workshops, hosted at NatWest Entrepreneurial Accelerator (formerly Entrepreneurial Spark Hub); Northstar Ventures; and Newcastle University
- Map-making and sense-making of the space we’re investigating (Please see Appendix for mindmaps we created at the beginning of our Pilot)
- Online presence; awareness creation; mailing list creation and promotion; workshop sign-ups
- We have conducted an initial literature review
- We created an online community — a Slack workspace — and also a web presence on Medium
Future Work
There is a clear, expressed and evidenced need for the work we have explored through our pilot, and as such our work will continue to develop beyond the end of the CFNE Innovation programme. This is deep and intimate work which requires a high degree of sensitivity when considering growth and scaling approaches.
A proposal has been submitted for consideration for a workshop to be delivered at the CFNE Conference in July. We are currently awaiting feedback from this proposal which we were encouraged to submit by the CFNE Team.
We are seeking to explore potential partnership opportunity with the NE One Creative Innovation Pilot Team. At the December mid point CFNE event it was identified that our projects were facing challenges that we may each be able to overcome through a partnership approach.
In the short term we will undertake a further evaluative process over the summer months as we move towards a second wave of events planned for Autumn 2018. During this time we will also review our options for funding. We believe that it is possible to secure finance to continue the development of our work.
Conversations are in progress with Digital Union in relation to their mental health/ wellbeing offer to SME’s following feedback from a workshop delivered at Dance City in May. This is an area they wish to explore further.
Several questions have been posed to us for consideration in our future work including:
- The legal structure of the Innovation Pilot
- Marketing messages and segmentation
- Market readiness
All of the above must be considered within the context of retaining the fidelity of what has so far been created.
Coda
To continued in our next post. If you’d like to hear from us in future, please consider signing up to our newsletter. Alternatively, you could e-mail us via our homepage [click on the envelope on the right hand side] and we’ll respond asap.
