As an eager Arts Foundation student back in 1985, I sat in the new TV and Video Editing suite at Cumbria College of Art and Design (now University of Cumbria) watching coloured pixels slowly building my portrait line by line on a screen. Perhaps I can claim it as an early selfie? It certainly seemed like some strange magic, my first taste of digital innovation. That moment from forty years ago stayed with me and influenced the choices I made later.

When I arrived at Trent Polytechnic (now Nottingham Trent University – NTU) in 1986 to study Fine Art, I chose it because it embraced multimedia, a bold move back then. Today, NTU’s Design and Digital Arts (DADA) building is packed with technology I could not have even imagined.

My next encounter with computer innovations was through Chris, my early adopter brother-in-law who went above and beyond, typing my words into an early Amstrad word processing machine as I dictated my Fine Art dissertation from my handwritten pages. He had a dot matrix printer, which was still churning out the continuous sprocket paper up until the time of the last train from Bristol Temple Meads back to Nottingham.

Despite the arduous task of separating each the sheet and tearing the perforations down the sides of each page, my finished document entitled “Female Sexuality and Biology: Fact, Fictions and Social Suppression / Oppression” made it to hand in two days later March 10, 1989.  I could write a whole other blog about how the pace of change for women hasn’t been quite so fast as for digital technology. The reason why creating the NTU Enterprise Female Founders Club supporting women in business matters so much to me. But back to the thread of my story.

I did not have access to employability or enterprise education at university in the 1980s, support which we now take for granted. When I graduated, I wanted to make a living from creativity but had little clue about business as a creative and had few role models. I tried a few things around the edges, before a “side hustle” was a thing, designing and making cards and prints for friends and family and creating a few commissions.

As an unemployed graduate, I signed up for a Chamber of Commerce course which gave me a grasp of basic trading concepts, and I wrote a pretty implausible business plan. That got me access to the government’s Enterprise Allowance Scheme: £40 a week to support early trading, if I registered as a sole trader and put £1,000 into my business (I borrowed this).

Digital print did not exist, offset lythography colour card printing needed big chunks of capital I did not have. I knew I needed to up my production for the numbers to add up so my saviour was colour laser copying. I was printing sheets of designs, hand-cutting and assembling elements myself!

However I soon realised I was not great at being a starving artist alone in a garret. I love food and people too much, so I pivoted to sharing my skills through workshops and later became an educator. My career and my creativity thrives on connecting and supporting others. I subsequently worked in museums and galleries and arts development before joining my alma mater NTU as an Enterprise Advisor on a programme called Enabling Innovation.

The Pace of Change

When I started my first business in 1990, I had no internet for research or marketing. Public Internet launched in 1991 and I encountered my first dial-up connection with a home PC sometime later, I can still hear the screeches and beeps as I write! Searching was through Ask Jeeves, arguably ahead of its time as a more relation style of search engine with a friendly butler character (The ChatGPT of its time!) eventually overpowered by Google.

Resources for creative entrepreneurs were scarce. Books like Pete Mosley’s Make Your Creativity Pay and T-Shirts and Suits by David Parrish came much later, texts I wish I had had (and written) earlier. I navigated change with gaps I now strive to fill for others. I ran my business for over twenty years, learning that adaptability is everything and making plenty of pivots along the way.

What Does this Mean for Us?

The Internet, digital tools and AI have changed everything. So, what is our role as enterprise educators now? How are we staying relevant? We cannot compete with the internet for information, but we can curate what matters and make it digestible. We can build confidence, helping our learners turn ideas into action. We can create spaces for collaboration, combating human homogenisation and creating places where diverse thinking thrives.

We also need to ask ourselves some tough questions. How do we design learning that feels relevant when knowledge is everywhere? How do we help students and graduates develop judgement, resilience, and creativity in a world where technology is moving faster than policy or ethics? These are the human questions that matter and I can’t find answers by running them through an AI.

So tell me what you are doing about it?

• Why are you in enterprise education?
• How are you designing innovative learning experiences for enterprise education?
• What are you learning from your students, graduates and colleagues?
• Where are you co-creating?
• How are you building confidence, creativity and connection?
• Where is innovation in your ecosystem?
• How are you supporting your team to thrive in this ever-changing environment?

I am delighted that Nottingham Business School here at NTU will host the 20th International Enterprise Educators Conference in 2026. I look forward to welcoming you to Nottingham, a city known for creativity, digital innovation and radical thinking.

The call for submissions to the conference will be coming soon. Be prepared to share your explorations in enterprise education. We may not have all the answers, yet, but our challenge is our opportunity to use our human skills together for the evolution of enterprise education.