"Speaking of “…the noble and profound application of ideas to life ” "
-Matthew Arnold

Do you believe the world is a closed system with limited volume of resources that must be shared by citizens of the world OR would you rather accept that the world is an open system with infinite resources and infinite capacities to continuously create new wealth?

If you believe in the former, then poverty and wealth can be reduced to a mere balancing problem that can be more or less summed up in the following statements:
a. Someone has to lose money, become poor or die for another to make money or become rich;
b. China’s economic ascent draws so much on the world’s resources and automatically puts the rest of the global economy in decline – down with China!
c. India’s IT outsource market automatically translates to America’s middle class opportunities being shipped off to India, inter alia.

From the most mundane economic observation, this finite resource argument lacks any kind of merit. Take global population expansion -- global human population has continuously grown for twenty to thirty thousand years, depending on who you listen to, yet resources has also continued to grow in tandem with population. If resources were finite, then global wealth should have gotten so terribly diluted that we would all have become a planet of severely malnourished paupers -- we would also have eaten up all naturally occurring resources and reverted back to cannibalism. But on the contrary, thank God, brand new millionaires and billionaires continue to sprout all around us everyday!

The object here is to introduce my special version of an entrepreneurial DNA test, which basically aims to determine individual entrepreneurial philosophies. It is not nearly geared towards establishing socialist, communist or capitalist archetypes, and it doesn’t necessarily predict who would make a better entrepreneur between a closed or open-system believer. The point is; your beliefs, desires and dreams bind your entrepreneurial drive. If you can’t envision it, you can’t attain it.

Vigorous wealth creation (as well as stagnation and regression) is a quantity that can be managed or manipulated to specific ends, as examples abound in history. My favorite example; the domestic recovery initiatives instituted by US President Truman right after WWII -- put jobless soldiers back to school, increased research funding in Universities, etc., and a few short years later, America gained tremendous new wealth resulting from a more educated workforce, and cutting edge technologies pouring out of university science and tech labs. My other favorite is the Singapore success story.

In SSA, entrepreneurship and wealth creation from leadership standpoint, is totally left to chance. Very wrong stance! Vigorous wealth creation can also be engineered and manipulated in SSA to very positive ends by a little bit of planning, social engineering and true leadership. It has been tested and proven to work!

ICT has brought the most recent wave of positive wealth contagion – from more familiar names like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, to the more recent inductees – Larry Page and Sergey Brin – the Google Boys, and the even more tender footed Chad Hurley and Steve Chen of YouTube fame, tons of brand new ICT millionaires have been minted across the globe and SSA is not left out – lots of sub-Saharan Africans have caught a whiff of the ICT promise too, and the excitement is building up. I’d say the situation is perfectly ripe for a little bit of strategic manipulation and management of ICT for wealth creation in a very promising entrepreneurial-bent/survivalist population.

What would an African ICT entrepreneur need besides the classical prerequisites of attitude, spunk and stamina? How about aptitude, skills, training, incubation, cash capital?

Aptitude:
I don’t particularly subscribe to the popular notion of talent; rather I believe strong interest begets zeal, and overwhelming zeal drives constant practice, and practice makes perfect. If you have a strong interest in something, then you’d willingly devote a lot of time and energy to it – sorta like doing it for the love of it. You can’t beat intrinsic motivation for the long haul.

Skills:
A workman can never be greater than his tools -- it is a poor workman who blames his tools for crappy work. We could never over-emphasize the fact that an entrepreneur absolutely needs to be well skilled in the use of whatever tool they work with. However, there are a variety of tools just like there are a variety of opportunity domains for aspiring ICT entrepreneurs. ICT entrepreneurs don’t always have to be computer nerds like Bill Gates or Michael Dell though. Take Donald Valentine for instance, his background was in marketing, and he probably couldn’t differentiate polymorphism in C++ from a medical condition, yet his venture capital firm, Sequoia capital, bankrolled the biggest and hottest IT outfits America has ever known – Apple, Cisco, Yahoo, Oracle, YouTube, you name it, Don did it! So, the ICT success story is not always about the technical skills – the financiers, the marketers, the managers, etc., all get to swing at the Piñata.

Training:
This is hallowed ground. My opinion here resonates strongly with James Boswell; “A man is not wise in proportion to his experience but in his capacity for experience.” In other words, show me a man who knows it all already, and I’ll show you a not-so-smart jackass. Train train train! Practice, practice, practice!!

Business Incubation:
Just another business school buzzword maybe? No Sireee! According to this Forbes article “There are [about] 4,000 business incubators/small business accelerators worldwide, according to the National Business Incubator Association (NBIA)…these startup breeding grounds provide a host of services, including relatively inexpensive office space, equipment, administrative assistance, management advice and training. Most get their funding from the government, universities or nonprofit organizations. The premise: Supporting small businesses [helps] create local jobs.” And here’s the clincher, “Incubated businesses have an 87% survival rate, and 84% go on to do business in their local regions.” Here’s a link to Africa incubation network and here’s a South African business incubation directory.

Cash:
Yes Cash is King, but I put it last on purpose because; having ready cash to throw at a startup may not always be beneficial. Due diligence, planning, expert guidance, biomimicry, etc., all constitute the DNA of a long term, sustainable business venture – it’s not by accident that Sequoia capital is the common thread between all the successful ICT businesses listed earlier. Point is – you want to make sure you know what you are doing, build your knowledge base, social and market networks as well as experiential capital, test and modify your process over and over until it’s perfect. It’s not a 100-meter dash – it’s a marathon, and you will need nourishment (cash infusion) all the way, but in measured sips.  

Happy trails!