Entrepreneurship going mainstream
Often, discussion about entrepreneurship tends to slip towards large rounds of financing, blockbuster IPOs, and college dropout millionaires. In the last 10 years, the success of Facebook, Google, Twitter and Whatsapp have caught the imagination of our generation and made entrepreneurs superstars. Now, with the increase in the number of startups, we are entering the age of democratised entrepreneurship. In future, entrepreneurship will be the mainstream profession and the primary job creator.
Most small businesses today are the non tech mom-and-pop stores in local communities. In the future, these businesses will be technology-enabled, executing on their business model in some way, shape or form (sales, distribution, etc.) that leverages technology. The brick-and-mortar small businesses we grew up with will become businesses built on exponential technology platforms, not dissimilar to how entrepreneurs are leveraging social platforms (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) to build businesses today.
Entrepreneurship is the fundamental driving force for future jobs, innovation and development. Ron Immink, founder of smallbusinesscan.com, portrays the future scenario with more people operating as entrepreneurs in the labour market, shifting careers on an ongoing basis. He outlines the following 5 forces that will propel entrepreneurship and the rise of microentrepreneurship:
- Emergence of flatter organisations mean limited vertical growth in terms of scope, impact and compensation/earnings. Therefore, more and more workers will prefer working on their own terms with more than one organisation simultaneously.
- All the non-core activities of an organisation will be increasingly outsourced to other organisations, which themselves will be a network of independent workers. Formal sector jobs will be few and even among them, the approach to the work will be intrapreneurial, i.e., you will be compensated for the impact you make to the business.
- Networks will be created and recreated dynamically and this is only possible in case of small entrepreneurial businesses
- Very importantly, becoming an entrepreneur will be (relatively) easy – because market access will be easy and credit will be easy and the power of networks will ensure that worker and customer locate each other quickly, easily and efficiently,e.g., new age taxi services like Uber where on demand service is offered by a multitude of independent cab drivers.
- As homes will be fully automated, more women entrepreneurs than ever will also join the workforce.
Our perspective
Nearly 1 in 3 worker in the US is already an independent contractor and the number is bound to increase with globalisation, connected network, and workers’ preference for flexibility and freedom. In the future, all of us will be entrepreneurs at one time or the other in our own career span. Technology has broken geographical boundaries and processes can be remotely managed as effectively as it could be done onsite.
The last two decades have witnessed many young people in their late 20’s and early 30’s venturing into entrepreneurship and in future we will see more young people entering the arena. In future, entrepreneurship will be a norm and it will also be an education.
Thus, students will need to imbibe the skills needed for success as an entrepreneur early on. Some of the skills that entrepreneurs of the future will need are:
Collaboration: The entrepreneurial ventures of tomorrow will be lean, sometimes only consisting of a sole entrepreneur. Therefore, learning to collaborate with your team members or other entrepreneurs to achieve your business objectives will be vital. And a lot of these collaborations will be virtual.
Increased Situational Awareness: The entrepreneurs and in general the entire human workforce will need higher level thinking skills to take decisions in dynamic and complex environments as the routine functions and processes will be automated and done by machines.
Extremely Resourceful: Becoming an entrepreneur will be easy but sustaining will be difficult because of increased competition. Thus, being extremely efficient in restrained conditions will be imperative.
Adaptive to Change: The entrepreneurs will be required to work across multiple disciplines, industries, platforms throughout their lifetime. Ability to change, quick responsiveness and being a lifelong learner will be critical.
Cross-Cultural Competency
As the world gets smaller, and we become even more connected globally, the ability to operate in cross cultural environment will become even more important.
However, to realise these skills in entrepreneurs of tomorrow, our education system needs to focus on soft skills (besides the core academic excellence), including problem-solving; team-building; transversal competences such as learning to learn, social and civic competence, initiative-taking, and cultural sensitivities. None of these are being taught in schools today.
Gazing through the crystal ball
What skills and conditions are required to prepare future entrepreneurs ?
- Domain knowledge – Deep knowledge of products, people and process will be requisite for any entrepreneurial venture. Interestingly, such deep knowledge cannot be found in books and have to come out of observational and analytical abilities. In turn, good academic learning capability (not necessarily high marks/grades) becomes critical for new-age entrepreneurs; in fact, the current outliers – accomplished self-learners without academic degrees (the famous drop outs) – will increasingly be the model entrepreneurs.
- Multidisciplinary resourcefulness – While there will be expertise/services available to cater to all domains of business functions, entrepreneurs will need to be self-reliant in applying most of them to ensure a uniquely competitive synthesis in ‘one head’.
- Technology – All businesses will have large dose of technology. Entrepreneurs will need to be well versed with state of art technologies, including ICTs.
- Family support – Entrepreneurs will need to remain invested with their idea for long. They will need to be patient and build a support structure around them for years of incubation/build up.
- Passion: Only those entrepreneurs will be successful who believe in their enterprise and enjoy doing their work. Money as sole motivation might not see them through for long.
