Sound bites for entrepreneurship

There have been 8 sound bites – that have impacted the nature of my work in entrepreneurship. Some of it has come from Ashrams, some from CEOs, some from research and others are just kind of in the air. 

These sound bites are listed here and will be explicated – in brief - in the coming weeks so that if any of the sound bites has a particular appeal we can reflect on them together in a discussion to follow.

Here is the list:

1 When the mind is full of little thoughts where is the space for big ideas (Vedanta Ashram, Bangalore)

2 We are not a small growing company – we are a big company starting small (Scott McNealey – Sun Microsystems, California)

3 Think big, act fast and be fearless (MIT – one of the faculty at a conference, Boston)

4 Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high…(Tagore, India) – Sorry this is a poem – not just a soundbite!

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

5 We need risk tolerance more than risk mitigation to alter society (Vyakarnam – based on a co-authored paper with Sahakian et al, 2008, UK)

6 Affordable loss as a principle to stimulate enterprise (Sarasvathy et al and home truth common sense, USA)

7 Seek forgiveness not permission (Unknown but all over the internet)

8  Entrepreneurs are not made or born – they are killed (Peter Dawe - on a train journey from London!)

Barefoot Entrepreneurs

This term “barefoot entrepreneurs” was coined for my presentation in Beijing and Ahmedabad. I was due to go to both places over a one week period to talk about this concept. Like a song that gets stuck in your head the idea of barefoot doctors from the 1930s has not left me since my dad told me about them in the early 1960s. These doctors were people from rural communities – travelling barefoot – who were given basic training in primary health care. They were paid for by collections in their villages and the idea was that they would be able to administer basic treatments and act as conduits for other forms of medical know how and knowledge. The term barefoot doctor – has become a metaphor for me to address another big set of problems: Ever growing numbers of underemployed and unemployed graduates of regional universities and institutions of further education. The young people who graduate form here are better equipped than those who drop out of secondary education, but are not sufficiently equipped to make it in the big city jobs – where – most probably – they need a good command of English. So we have an inventory of capable young people with nowhere to go. And by the way – we may well be stoking up “the angry young man” by developing a sub-optimal educated class of person – in their millions. We also have another problem – how to address the socio-economic needs of the people at the so-called “bottom of the economic pyramid”? Where are the solutions and and products and services that the very poor can buy/use to generate incomes and get some relief from drudgery of labour? How do we get better health, opportunities and improvements to their lifestyle to them? The last big experiment in this sector was micro-credit and while that has had enormous success – it has also lead to some critical questions about creating a very large pool of indebtedness. In summary – show me a solution and eventually we will find a problem! Actualy in some parts of India – micro-credit has been a hugely negative experience due to people borrowing for “non-productive’ uses. Sub-prime lending at its worst. Within this complex context then – what do we do? Anil Gupta in Ahmedabad and Liyang Zhang in Beijing have both started to champion rural innovations – grass roots innovations. My part in the discussion is about – “so Who will take the innovations to market?” Rural innovations that are embedded in a deep understanding of context are very powerful sources of new opportunities. They might be incremental improvements to day-to-day life or they may be radical changes (such as a mud based cooler). But once they have been invented the scaling up of the product so that it can provide economic benefits is where the challenge lies. Is this the role then for the barefoot entrepreneur? The young people with higher levels of education than can be the ligament between formal institutions and the informal communities from which they come. They know the markets – more importantly they know the customers – why they will buy, how much they can pay, what the issues might be for implementation and use of new solutions. They also have enough education to understand funding, marketing, business building and meeting regulatory requirements (they can fill in the endless forms!). There is only one way to find out if there is a future for barefoot entrepreneurs. Get a cohort of recent graduates from regional universities, mix them with rural grass roots innovations and get them to do a commercialization project. Wrap this up with funding, entrepreneurship training, business education and mentoring. Follow up in some detail and review after about two years. My instinct – having been in entrepreneurship education for 25 years+ is that there is likely to be a good deal of success with such a model and the outcomes will be at least threefold: 1. A new class of entrepreneurs who can connect rural with city 2. Innovations that not only see the light of day but can become transformational 3. Social and economic benefits from the day to day use of the innovations My sincere apologies to Liyang and Anil for not going to the conferences – my back gave up with a big bang and I could not travel. I hope you accept this blog and slide deck as my intent to work with you both! Shai