The Digital Business Britain Manifesto calls for the digital skills gap to be closed, encouraging UK businesses to develop a Digital Mindset, which will, in turn, enable them to leverage business growth opportunities.

At a time when the UK economy is facing tough challenges, business leaders, business owners and those in Government need to do more to embrace the opportunities created by the digital revolution. Developing an understanding of the value of digital technology, digital networks and the tools they offer to business, will enable the UK economy to begin to thrive again. Digital Business needs to become a respected and recognised sector and skill set within UK business.

Giving it such credence and focus will help to support more start-up businesses, create jobs, build business growth and ensure the UK has a strong reputation within the online global conversations that lead to profitable business. Britain’s digital assets need to be nurtured and grown. Without them UK business will be poorer.

Individuals and businesses, regardless of their size, have much to learn about how to ‘think digitally’ in the execution of their day-to-day business. A lack of understanding of the digital world means that many individuals and businesses are missing out on valuable growth opportunities. At the moment the internet is used as a transactional tool to buy and sell products or raise awareness. Few truly understand the potential of the internet and the positive impact it could have on their businesses. So there is an urgent need to teach business people how to embrace the digital and social business world.

Developing a Digital Mindset goes far beyond access, superfast broadband and internet marketing. By effectively engaging in social business networks and using the internet to its full potential, these same individuals and businesses have the opportunity to share best practice, challenge established ideas and thought processes, ask for help, identify new customers and suppliers, build trust, and collaborate with each other and their customers to accelerate their business development.

Now more than ever businesses need to engage with their customers. As trust develops so customers interact more with businesses, using a range of digital tools to open a dialogue of the kind only made possible by the digital revolution. The challenge businesses and individuals now face is the need to move their business behaviour from being Closed, Selective and Controlling (CSC), which doesn’t work in the digital world, to becoming Open, Random and Supportive (ORS) in all their actions and  intentions. This requires a new and very different mindset.

The Digital Business Britain Manifesto was co-created with Bob Barker, who previously chaired the Government’s Information Age Partnership working party on UK ICT competitiveness. Penny and Bob worked together on many digital projects particularly around the ‘skills’ agenda helping Business Coaches and Business Leaders to adapt to the digital environment.

The shared intention of Penny and Bob is to ensure that businesses across the UK have access to skills and can plan and execute their digital strategy at Board level through to senior and middle management. Having worked within the digital arena from its early days in the mid 1990s, the skills agenda is now of increasing concern.

Bob and Penny met through Ecademy, a social business network for SMEs and entrepreneurs, founded in the UK by Penny Power in 1998. At a time when businesses were waking up to websites and the transactional opportunities offered by online technology, Penny recognised the collaborative and supportive nature of online business networking and realised that this could create the environment in which digital business could thrive and grow.

The skills agenda is key to the success of digital implementation and both Penny and Bob want to bring to market a solution to the need for great engagement and network thinking within UK business. Helping to achieve the desired result of growing the UK Digital Industry from 8.3% of the economy (contributing £121bn) to the UK Government's aspiration of £225bn by 2016*.

This Manifesto was first published on 10th March 2011. Following five months of intensive research and think-tanks, Penny wrote and published, (with the support of Fast Future Research), her White Paper recommending practical solutions that can be created for the implementation of the suggestions made in this Manifesto.

A copy of the White Paper ‘Exploiting the Future Potential of Social Media within UK Small to Medium Enterprises can be downloaded as a PDF pennypower.co.uk