It was the afternoon of New Year’s Day. My efforts at aimless tranquility were interrupted by a monolog from the family room. “Where is it? It has to be here somewhere.” I enter to find my wife bent over what has become a New Year’s Day tradition. The table was strewn with small odd sized pieces some of which fit together to form a delightful picture of horses in an aspen forest. The puzzle, however, was not complete and the consternation involved in the continuing effort seemed to be escalating. She explained to me that progress had been slow but steady until this point. Achievement of the goal was now in jeopardy because there seemed to be a piece missing. A missing piece between what had been done and what was left to do. Needless to say, I was soon drafted in to the effort and dedicated my life, from that moment forward, to find the missing piece.
Some observe that the entrepreneurial mind has been the missing piece that has spawned legacy changes throughout history. A perceptive look at the history, geography, and legacy of globalization, reveals a recurring theme around the topic. In today’s world entrepreneurism is hot. With the emergence of e-commerce as a tool for empowering individual, it is driving transformation and emerging economies everywhere.
Entrepreneurship is not a new term, but it has become a main stage player in the technologically connected world. This creative destruction not only creates new things but also uses a new eye to combine ideas in unique ways to make new products and technologies. It is the capacity to see things differently from a different perspective. It is not simply starting a business and managing its resources but seeing those resources in different ways that make them more effective and produce new value chains attractive to whole new markets.
The first phase of entrepreneurial development in the information technology space was the creation of hardware and software. The second phase was the creation of access by the general populous to the technology platforms and to the global stage. Phase three is the technology industry’s focus on developing new business models. Today the entrepreneur puts a product, service, or application onto the Internet with virtually no control over that consumer’s access to the offering. It is a simple process of providing direct solutions to consumer problems.
Entrepreneurship centres succeed because of the ecosystem around them. These systems have world class universities with cutting edge research, new ideas, and open environments. There is access and availability of capital through alternative sources as many financial centres don’t always foster entrepreneurship. Capital access needs the third leg of the stool to function properly. This third leg is the willingness of people to take risks. This is a basic recognition that failure is not a negative. Failure is viewed as a positive necessity of success. More lessons are learned from failures than from success.
The top four reasons why people become entrepreneurs are money, flexibility, control, and the desire to leave a legacy. Entrepreneurial rationale drives a way of thinking, a different view of the world, a different spirit. Interestingly some of the most successful entrepreneurs are coming from developing countries and emerging economies. The presence of technological interconnectivity is enabling constant improvement with more entrepreneurs understanding the business environment, how to create disruptive innovation, and how to thrive in their environments.
Every business today, entrepreneurial or not, is a global business from day one whether the product is digital or not. If it's available online, it is accessible by consumers everywhere. As these missing pieces begin to fit into place a new picture of the world begins to immerge and the puzzle becomes more recognizable.