Allan Gibb (27 August 2014)

Professor Allan Gibb has for several years been advisor to the UK National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship and has designed and directed national programmes for the HE and FE staff and university senior staff.  He is holder of The Queen’s Lifetime Achievement in Enterprise Award and was the first holder of the European Entrepreneurship Education Award in 2012.

Allan gave BBE students a great deal of his time before the talk to discuss with us how some of his methods could benefit our businesses. He emphasised bridging the gap between concept and practice.  He was keen to highlight the importance of scalability in our businesses to make sure the profitability is there in the short term. It is important for BBE students to understand that if we continue our businesses after the course then we must be able to provide for ourselves in terms of earning a living. This really made some of the BBE students look at their business in terms of numbers and realise how much they would have to sell to make a reasonable living for themselves. Allan felt that one of the fundamentals of studying business was learning on a need-to-know basis. Business schools forget about this and waste too much time learning the in-depth parts and missing out on the fundamental concept of how to learn from stakeholders.

Based on articles by Tom Bowen and Enqi Fan