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Encouraging SSA EntrepreneursSubmitted by Boko on 9 November, 2006 - 02:43.
"Speaking of “…the noble and profound application of ideas to life ” " 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: 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: Skills: Training: Business Incubation: Cash: Happy trails! |