Prescription for Entrepreneurship

Richard Joseph
Caribbean Business Services Limited

“Wealth is actually created at the microeconomic level – in the ability of firms to create valuable goods and services using efficient methods. Only in this way can a nation support high wages and the attractive returns to capital necessary to support sustained investment.” (Michael Porter) Since entrepreneurs create the firms that create the wealth, stimulating and teaching entrepreneurship is rapidly becoming the new recipe for improving incomes among the poorer sectors of our society. Is entrepreneurship a practicable skill, that when acquired through formal training, enables the recipient to become a successful entrepreneur? I suspect that the answer to this depends on which of the many definitions of entrepreneurship skills is used.

At one end of the continuum, training in entrepreneurship is basically made up of technical business courses such as accounting, marketing and human resources that are really skills for entrepreneurs, rather than entrepreneurial skills. Participants are usually introduced to standard models of business planning and encouraged to think “strategically” which would assist them in coming up with entrepreneurial solutions to the problems that they face.

At the other end of the continuum, entrepreneurship is a form of business innovation or creative synthesis, a concept that is very challenging to define. It involves imagining new products and services that satisfy unmet needs, or existing needs in a more satisfying manner, and successfully introducing them.

According to Peter Drucker, innovation “is capable of being presented as a discipline, capable of being learned, capable of being practiced.” When I asked a prominent businessman of Levantine extraction about how he developed his entrepreneurial skills, he replied that he learnt from listening to his father and older brothers discuss the challenges they met and solved every evening when they returned home. This of course cannot be reduced to some form of packaged product for easy dissemination.

Most successful entrepreneurs attribute their success to practical means: “The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It's as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.” (Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese's)

If entrepreneurship is more a behavioural characteristic than a discipline how do we go about developing this behaviour in the short to medium term? Governments throughout the world have tried a variety of strategies, and found that there is no common solution as local culture plays an important role. I believe that in our case we have to change our culture to one where responsibility for solving problems when they arise is accepted and encouraged. We tend to complain and look for someone, whether God or Government, to solve our problems for us, rather than getting up and doing something about it ourselves. How we go about doing this will require considerable thought and discussion.

Trinidad and Tobago has a large segment of the population that sees entrepreneurship in a positive light, worthy of aspiration. If we can find ways of reducing the risks in entrepreneurship that now exist we may go some way towards stimulating it further. Many people are quite capable of seeing opportunity but are reluctant to grasp it because of the unknown. They may take advantage of opportunity if they believe that the hurdles can be overcome. The role of the Government should then be channelled to removing the hurdles blocking opportunity, rather than in creating opportunity itself.

What are the hurdles that entrepreneurs face? The first is market uncertainty. This type of uncertainty can be reduced by improving access to information about markets through the Central Statistical Office (local markets) and TIDCO (foreign markets). Both of these institutions should be provided with the resources to respond comprehensively to the market intelligence needs of entrepreneurs.

The second is unfair competition, which may be reduced through impartial enforcement of legislation and regulations such as anti-dumping, product labelling, food safety, and payment of customs duties.

The third is technical support at an affordable cost from a more developed resource base at institutions such as CARIRI and Business Development Company.

The fourth is access to capital at an affordable cost. Since the suppliers of capital also want to reduce risk, any effort to achieve this for entrepreneurs will have a positive effect on the availability of funds from both local and foreign sources.

The list above is only a start, and even though some of the ground had been covered already, the issues have not been addressed satisfactorily. We should not waste our time looking for silver bullets or magic solutions. I believe that we know what we have to do and just have to get off our collective butts and do it.