A new Government led initiative to boost enterprise will see up to 4,000 entrepreneurial university students and graduates in England connecting with small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs).

Armed with a few thousand pounds of someone else’s money, most of us will begin the journey of entrepreneurship. This is exactly where I was a number of years ago. I had £10,000 in the bank. I had a strong idea (people kept telling me so) and I was completely up for the challenge. I was bright, extremely hard working and fearless. I was motivated, determined and prepared to sacrifice a typical teenage life in order to build a business. Today, nearly five years down the line, most of the things I did in the weeks and months that follow sound ridiculous. It was hard not to resent myself for making the mistakes, for not knowing better – I, for a long time, accepted them as mistakes that I would learn from, as necessary steps in my entrepreneurial journey, part of the ride and believed they would add value to the ultimate prize. Recently, I have realised that they were simply the actions of someone that didn’t and shouldn’t have known better and weren’t really ‘a necessary part of my journey’ at all. They were painful, expensive and hard to recover from.

With the announcement of National Apprenticeship Week (6-10 Feb), government funding has now been put in place to drive high quality apprenticeships as a route into occupations.

New research shows that business leaders in high growth or emerging economies see direct air links as vital to maintaining the UK’s prospects in global markets.

UK GDP in Q4 2011 down -0.2% in the quarter, up 0.8% in the year.

The pillars of British business are formally backing the Government’s flagship programme to ensure every young person is either earning or learning through the Youth Contract, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has announced.

The government wants us to be more entrepreneurial as a country - a great idea. Entrepreneurs represent the engine of our economy and the likely solution to our economic woes. However, if the government wants us all to become more entrepreneurial then they should start looking at their own back yard - the public sector.

Business Secretary Vince Cable today set out the next steps to diversify business finance, announcing details of an industry-led Taskforce to be led by Tim Breedon, Legal and General chief executive and current chairman of the Association of British Insurers.

It seems to be something of a truism in politics that if an untruth is repeated loud enough and with enough frequency it becomes imbued with a de-facto plausibility. 'It must be a good idea if I keep hearing about it'. That kind of logic.