I have a confession to make. There is no such word as ‘entreprenabling’. I just made it up. But language is a living thing, right? Shakespeare made up hundreds of new words, as did Victor Hugo, I’m sure, though I have no claims of much knowledge on the works of the latter and my memory of the first dates back to schoolboy days. Oh the shame of it all.

Still, I digress. By ‘entreprenabling’ I mean the act of enabling entrepreneurship or setting the right environment for entrepreneurs to flourish. And that’s a good thing isn’t it? Entrepreneurs create things and that in turn creates jobs, They also create wealth, which is taxed and used to pay for schools and hospitals and welfare. And research. More entrepreneurship equals better health and education surely. I know that this is an over-simplistic view of things and I may be skating on politically thin ice here, but the better the private sector does, the more the public sector gets to spend, surely?

What’s all this got to do with research then? In my last blog (which was also my first for this website), I talked about the importance of cross referencing research so that one project may help or find synergies in another one. Those clever people at the Urban Europe JPI (I’m hoping they are reading this) intended that as part of their recent get together of all the projects in their first two pilot calls. As you would expect, there were lots of researchers in the rooms – Professors, Doctors, Academics – all with brains the size of a small planet. But I also noticed that there not many entrepreneurs present – two in fact – myself and Birgt.

What’s the relevance of that? I hear you say (or perhaps the ruder version – who invited you?). Well, conducting research is a Good Thing and conducting coordinated cross-national research such as the JPI series is an Even Better Thing. But only to a point. Not if the be and end all is simply conducting research, publishing it and then filing it in an archive somewhere. But if the research can influence and inform policy makers or being exploited by entrepreneurs to create products and services for the betterment of fellow citizens, then there is a tangible benefit to it all.

Of course, some research is just to better our understanding of the universe and everything in it, but I just got a sense that too little was being done to turn research into benefits. And that’s where the entrepreneurs come in. And why we should ‘entreprenable’ research.

Et tu Bruté.