Why Entrepreneurship Is Not Just for Mavericks
3 Fitness Test of Endemic Entrepreneurship
Now that countries are slowly coming to terms with the COVID -19 pandemic, it behooves us to treat it as an “endemic”. A menace to be tolerated but nonetheless managed. “Business of the future” will begin to replace “business as usual”. A sense of meaningful human existence will have to be created, captured and embedded. There is no doubt that entrepreneurs will have an important role in this. I like to call it “practopreneurship”.
Personal Test= Create Meaning
Value is pivotal to any business or life proposition. Value-creation is essentially meaning-creation, evaluation and perpetuation. Starting from the individual, radiating out to organizations and ultimately becoming an integral part of national identity. Meaning is discovered first by an individual, their dreams transformed into ventures and enterprises. Such persons, the “practopreneur”, derives meaning by “living in more than one world”. A student of life, practopreneurs co-create with society, leaving behind a national legacy.
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Organizational Test=Capture Interactions
Education ceases to merely be an endgame or rite of passage. Life becomes one long process of learning that is the backbone of “practopreneurship”. Life-long learning also requires that the entrepreneur or any worker be engaged in all sorts of testing and learning about assumptions. The venture and enterprise becomes a platform to capture and evaluate value. The embodiment of its founder(s)’ ideas and philosophy. This however is not a settled fact. For as long as the organization exists, its underlying business assumptions will be constantly tested by market forces. Ideally these assumptions would have been adapted through co-creative interactions between its members as well.
National Test=Embed Resilience
Scaling and expanding this process into the larger and wider picture would require an embedding of innovation DNA into the economy, adding value at the corners of the Smile Curve, the shape of the smile being more pronounced as we enter the IR4.0 era. Simply churning out more IPO-worthy ventures at breakneck pace or creating aimlessly (i.e. fabrication, content etc.) will not guarantee a place in the global leaderboard. Its time for the creative class to come to the fore, practopreneurship will be the modus operandi that ensures a meaningful, thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem . In the words of Pearl Zhu, the digitalization guru:
“A business ecosystem is just like the natural ecosystem; first, needs to be understood, then, needs to be well planned, and also needs to be thoughtfully renewed as well.”
A resilient entrepreneurial system is self-renewing. Echoing what Schumpeter so famously called, “gales of creative destruction.”
Next: The 3Es of Practopreneurship…
