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Humber Business Week founder Dr Paul Sewell OBE has told how inspiration remains key when it comes to creating an entrepreneurial culture.

Addressing the festival’s launch as the - with internationally-acclaimed figures and domestic champions heading to Hull - Dr Sewell urged the city’s business leaders to get behind the annual activity, in a bid to banish economic gloom.

“Thank you all for keeping Business Week alive and kicking,” he told a healthy audience. “It is needed just as much now, if not more, than it ever has been. There’s still a dependency culture, going cap-in-hand for hand-outs, when we should be creating our own indigenous entrepreneurial culture. If business doesn’t do it, who will?”

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An ambassador of self-start and localism, the Sewell Group chair said: “Business still needs its role models. We don’t have enough role models to convince young people to look at business over anything else.”

He recalled how in the formative years of Humber Business Week a study had revealed how only 6 per cent of students were looking at enterprise as a career, with professions and public sector roles dominating.

“How do you build an indigenous entrepreneurial culture with 6 per cent? We have to have business role models. Sugar, Branson, Meaden, there aren’t many. I know, I’ve tried to fill the bill for business conventions, and you have to branch out to entertainers and sports people, and get them to talk business.”

Dr Sewell then revealed how he discovered two of the “endangered species” on a recent retail study tour of Japan and South Korea he went on with son Patrick, who runs Sewell on the Go.