Do you want to give the youth in your city a fair chance to flourish with their ideas and entrepreneurial drive? Do you want to support young entrepreneurs as policy makers, and institutions, without stifling them with unintended but deep-seated social prejudices, so familiar as experience, but almost invisible to the eye, as everyday barriers for youth entrepreneurial development and success?

Culture Based Development (CBD) and its value-free analysis of values can help you do that, as we learnt at the OECD-Brett Centre Workshop on Influencing Youth Entrepreneurship Policy in Liverpool in the end of March 2023. 

On 23 March 2023 in Liverpool, Dr. Annie Tubadji (Swansea University/PASCAL Observatory LCN leader) presented her work on cultural hysteresis at the workshop.  

Annie's talk demonstrated how the application of her CBD research paradigm and its value-free analysis of values approach can help policymakers to 'unbox' young people from the cultural prejudices of society and institutions. Annie's CBD paradigm claims that not only can this unboxing ensure that every youth entrepreneurial spark is given the chance to blaze into its own powerful innovative fire, but also that it can boost the engine of the local economy to its truly optimal level. 

The workshop was the first of a series of workshops, part of a joint project of the Brett Centre in cooperation with the OECD, that contributes to policies that address the challenges facing young people entering and working in the labour market.  

The aim of this project is to influence policy support for youth entrepreneurship. Its objectives are to: 

1. Examine the specific challenges that young people face when considering entrepreneurship (e.g. cultural, skill, finance, networking);
   
2. Develop and publish an evidence-based policy paper on youth entrepreneurship through the OECD;
3. Build capacity through the establishment of a youth entrepreneurship network that the principal researchers can activate to draw upon for future research activities and proposals. 

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals envisage a major role for youth entrepreneurship and youth social entrepreneurship specifically (see Youth Social Entrepreneurship and the 2030 Agenda | United Nations For Youth). Furthermore, UNICEF has long advocated for economic youth entrepreneurship as a goal to alleviate youth unemployment which was aggravated during the COVID-19 pandemic (Youth-entrepreneurship-concepts-and-evidence-issue-brief-2019.pdf (unicef.org).  

Cities are the focal points for migrants in hope of new jobs and for finding markets your novel ideas. Do you feel that young entrepreneurs in your city know enough about the above UN SDGs? Do they need more attention and opportunity to engage with the SDGs? Do you want to read the reports on youth entrepreneurship globally and learn about experiences in unboxing the world of opportunities for them from around the globe? To learn more about these questions, follow Annie and her colleagues from the OECD-Brett Centre Workshop series, which continues next in London and Paris. 

Twitter handles and keywords: 

#CBD_paradigm #cultural_hysteresis 

@RobABlackburn, Brett Centre @LivUnivEntrep, @OECD 

@tubadoki, @DianeHolt, @DavidHalabisky, @FranciscoLinan, @DarellKofkin