AAA Entrepreneurs provide lessons in what they need

Entrepreneurs provide lessons in what they need

What is required to build the most favourable environment for entrepreneurs? This was one of the themes explored during the recent 4th World Entrepreneurship Forum held in Singapore. Founded by French business school EM Lyon, accountancy firm KPMG and Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, the forum is designed as a global think-tank aiming to explore entrepreneurship in practice as well as creating a worldwide community.

The forum took 120 entrepreneurs from 70 countries
and found there is actually an almost universal definition of entrepreneurs.

They are culturally savvy, innovative risk-takers on the one hand, and individuals with high levels of curiosity, extreme resilience to failure and non-conformist tendencies on the other. This near-universality makes it easier to find ways to help encourage their development – something governments round the world are keen to do as small and medium-sized enterprises created 84% of new jobs in the European Union between 2002 and 2007.

Debate revealed entrepreneurs needed mainly a delicate and surprising mix of broad education, paired with tolerance to difference and risk-taking values, and underpinned by real-life inspirational models.

Jeffrey Nadison, chief executive of the Nanyang Technology University Innovation Centre, said: "Innovation lies at the interface of disciplines. In our incubators, we immerse our students in an unorthodox environment pairing arts and science, or exposing them to calligraphy and painting, for instance, on the top of business plan creation.

It is tremendously important to reconcile the left and the right brains, to develop different perspectives."

"An education à la Montessori", was the primary cause of being entrepreneurial, according to Guillaume Gauthereau, founder of Totsy.com, a private sales website aimed at mothers with young children and currently one of the top five fastest-growing ventures on the US east coast.

He means an education rooted in experiences that seeks foremost to multiply and enrich everyone’s reference and knowledge frameworks.

Gauthereau’s own experience reflects this as the product of several environments and value frameworks. A veterinarian by training, his first venture was creating the veterinary school business club to mirror French business school models. He then spent some time in the luxury industry, but also created his first start-up consulting for celebrities and is passionate about photography at his current home in New York.

If a country wants to foster entrepreneurs, it has to foster inherently innovative people, something most existing education policies were set up to avoid as they wanted people trained to follow set teaching from an authority figure.

Tamara Abdel-Jaber, a 36-year-old Jordanian ranked 39th on a list of the 100 most influential women in the Arab world, said: "In Jordan, success is defined as being either an engineer or a civil servant, and I did not want this. I wanted to do something different. My first entrepreneurial step was having the courage to deviate from the norm.

"I regularly try to bring students to Palma’s office [her business consultancy] to show them another way, show them responsibility and consequences in action – to inspire them by example."

Encouraging breaks with expected patterns appears to be another key cultural element in our quest for entrepreneurs. China is currently embarking on a soul-searching exercise, pondering why it cannot foster technical entrepreneurs, let alone find "the next Steve Jobs", the late cofounder of computing giant Apple.

Nicolas Pan, the Malaysian Chinese co-founder of Class- Booking, a Hong Kong-based start-up offering an online knowledge management system for learning centres, said the reason was, "China’s culture is profoundly rooted in respect for the eldest and in providing for the community".

He added: "It comes with a high pressure on you to conform and comply as an individual. It can definitely hinder your emergence as an entrepreneur." Fostering entrepreneurs will also require a profound interrogation of social value sets, not only to tolerate or welcome difference, but to go one step further and celebrate difference.

"Innovators have the ability to challenge the status quo with a vision and appetite for change," Nadison said, "and this is what needs to be nurtured and celebrated."

But how do you change a nation’s psyche? Ecuador seems to have a head start on this issue as its authorities are working to create a new definition of success and new leaderships models. It has started to celebrate risk-taking individuals and to praise failure as a way of learning.

Fernando Moncayo Castillo, founder of Start-Ups, one of the first business incubators in Ecuador, said: "Emprende Ecuador was a recent national business creation competition.

It provided real-life models of entrepreneurs in the making and followed them from idea creation to business reality, with some funding from the government. In the last edition, it received tremendous press coverage and has now a full TV programme.

"The show aimed to create sparks in people and show them another way, as objectively as possible. The programme does not spare the ups and downs of entrepreneurial life, and shows as much success as failure. This is what it will take to change a national culture."

It can take 20 years to change a culture, the forum heard.

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