An entrepreneur is the most important agent of change in a market ecosystem, and the entrepreneurship is generally described as the process of discovering new ways of combining resources. In Joseph Schumpeter’s terms, entrepreneurs are the “the agents of creative destruction”, and seen as one of the most important sources of innovation in today's knowledge economy. Entrepreneurs trigger change in a given system every time they innovate. Design is also about bringing change into an existing system. According to Herbert Simon, everybody designs who devises courses of action aimed at “changing existing situations into preferred ones.” Entrepreneurship and design share the same purposefulness for changing the existing for better, and both are strongly connected to the concept of innovation.  These bring them closer, and create  opportunities for more effective ways of  changing the existing for better for the whole of the society as much as individuals.

Just like design, entrepreneurship needs to be and can be encouraged and developed via collaborative support mechanisms of governments, universities, NGOs and private sector. In this context, the British Council’s “International Young Design Entrepreneur Awards” scheme is a unique and effective support mechanism, which provides young entrepreneurs with new opportunities through design.  For the last ten years, design communities in Turkey and abroad have increasingly experienced an inflation of design awards with too many competitions but trivial contents and scopes. “Young Design Entrepreneur” is one of the few meaningful programs of support through an awarding system, which explores the field of creative industries through the eyes of young entrepreneurs.  Istanbul Technical University (ITU) Department of Industrial Product Design is proud to be a partner of the British Council’s “International Young Design Entrepreneur Award” program in Turkey, and sincerely hopes the further development of the program, which perfectly fits into the  dynamic nature of the Turkish economy.