A colleague I work closely with recently described a pattern he'd noticed after years of working across healthcare, education and technology. He put it something like this:
Two children. Same postcode. Same school.
One has a parent who cleans offices for a living. The other has a parent who runs a small company that cleans offices for a living.
On paper, not so different.
The second child grows up hearing conversations about scheduling software, recruiting staff, winning contracts and keeping customers. Nobody plans these lessons. They happen over breakfast, in the car, or around the dinner table.
The first child grows up hearing different conversations. Equally valuable in their own way, but less likely to include how organisations make decisions, solve problems or create opportunities.
Neither family has set out to teach entrepreneurship. One child has simply been exposed to it more often.
I've found myself coming back to that idea recently. Not because of schools, but because of the conversations I've been having with employers, universities and innovation networks.
A regional skills forum I joined recently brought together colleges, employers, the NHS and local government, all working to build a pipeline of talent into medtech and life sciences. It felt like everyone in the room wanted the same thing: young people, from any background, getting a real foothold in the sector.
And still, the room kept running into the same wall. Placements were hard to arrange — not because employers didn't want to help, but because a fortnight of work experience is a genuine logistical strain on a large organisation, harder to sign off than anyone outside HR would guess. Smaller companies could sometimes offer more flexibility than the big, obvious names. Universities were often approaching the same small pool of willing employers, sometimes without a shared view of who else was asking.
Access to opportunity often begins with access to conversations.
I noticed something similar, at a much smaller scale, in a room of business leaders a few weeks earlier. A hotel director, a timber importer, a marketing consultant, all in the same room, all facing versions of the same problem. None of them needed someone to hand them the answer. The answer came out of the room itself, the moment enough different people were in it at the same time.
An adult in the right room picks up an idea from a stranger in an afternoon. A child picks up the same kind of thing, without anyone intending it, just from growing up where organisational conversations are more visible.
The more I think about it, the less convinced I am that the biggest gap is information. Access to information isn't really the main problem anymore.
The harder thing to access is exposure: seeing how decisions are made, hearing different perspectives, understanding how organisations actually work.
For innovation ecosystems, this matters because talent pipelines are shaped not only by formal placements, but by repeated exposure to how organisations think, decide and solve problems.
We can't recreate eighteen years around someone else's dinner table. But perhaps we can become much more intentional about creating the kinds of environments where those conversations become possible.
Disclaimer: This article is a personal reflection drawing on professional conversations and meetings. No individuals or organisations are identified, no comments are attributed, and the views expressed are entirely my own.
