Feeding your Entrepreneurial Spirit
How to Unleash the Entrepreneur in You
Books and articles on entrepreneurship have suggested that the key to embarking on entrepreneurial ventures lies in the twin factors of innovativeness and a favourable set of attitudes towards failure. The extent to which the entrepreneurial spirit flourishes would however be influenced by conducive social and economic infrastructural conditions such as incentives.
Innovativeness requires a constantly questioning mind of everything around us, be it economics, hello kitty toys, cash cards, politics, etc. Innovativeness is killed instantly by a narrow focus on only quantitative or alphabetical measures of relevance and achievements. The examples are: do not ask questions or do things that are not included in the examination syllabus, or which do not add to Co-Curricular Activities (CCA) points, or which do not seem profitable initially. Narrow pragmatism is the bane of the entrepreneurial spirit in Singapore.
Many have suggested a strange and unusual “Make, Not Maids” solution to entrepreneurship development in Singapore. They believe that if domestic maids are eliminated in Singapore, then the next generations will grow up more entrepreneurial than the current ones. This solution reflects a naive misunderstanding of the nature of the entrepreneurial spirit.
The number of domestic maids in Singapore has spiked to 250,000 in Jun 2020 from 201,000 in 2010 and only 50,000 in 1990. Every 5th household now has a domestic maid as compared with just one in 13 households in 1990. Many children grow up with domestic maids waiting on them, feeding them, running errands and carrying their school bags. In their teens, some were seen having their army backpacks carried by their domestic maids as they reported to their unit base very weekend. True, the comfortable and cushy life-style as a young person would make it more daunting and could dampen the risk-taking habits necessary for entrepreneurship. Of greater decisive importance however is their attitude towards failure.
For a conducive attitude towards failure, it is important to ask: “what constitutes failure in the minds of Singaporeans?” If the threshold of failure is merely conceived of not being able to acquire more money or material wealth when compared with one’s neighbours or peers, than there is little surprise that few Singaporeans would even dare walk the less traveled paths of entrepreneurship.
Is a life without failures worth living?
Failure should be seen more correctly as a part and parcel of life. As adults, we know that it is. With this perspective, parents and society would perhaps not see failures as negative experiences, but as important aspects of child development, like walking and breaking a fall. The fear of falling will stifle innovativeness and the growth of the entrepreneurial spirit.
Most Singapore children have been brought up along a journey of certainty, predictability and comfortable safety. For the academically better endowed, their talents and competencies have been narrowly directed to achieve only the certainties of academic grades. Sports and CCA are not actively promoted for the holistic intellectual, physical and social development of students. The entrepreneurial journey, on the other hand, is strewn with risks and uncertainties along the way. For the entrepreneurs, the only certainties exist only briefly for the moment; and constant vigilance through research, information collection, market and environmental scanning are needed in order to stay in the play.
An innovative “Reality-Learning” Entrepreneurship Project for final year electrical and electronic engineering (EEE) students in the Singapore Nanyang Technological University (NTU) was designed to allow groups of students to experience and learn “failure” repeatedly during the Project. They have to conceive of an original idea, innovate it, make a working prototype, evaluate its manufacturability with material vendors, assess its marketability, calculate its financial viability with real data, and discover its ultimate appeal and feasibility in the marketplace.
At any time during the Entrepreneurship Project, the idea may become unfeasible or impractical because it is not original, or could not be made, or could not be marketed, or could not be priced above its actual cost, or could not find supply vendors, or a place to manufacture, or gain approval for licenses needed …etc. In the event, the affected student group would have to refine its idea or change to new ones and start all over again. Students earned marks in stages for “failing” and knowing why they “failed”, as they recovered with fresh solutions from the lessons of failure to survive them. The “Blue Ocean Strategy” was later incorporated to provide a real-world framework for entrepreneurship.
The EEE Entrepreneurship Project aims to disrupt the students’ expectations of certainty, predictability and comfortable safety with real-life encounters with vendors, customers and service providers, as well as the vagaries of the marketplace. The NTU however abandoned the Entrepreneurship Project in 2010 as it wanted to focus more on academia and research instead of entrepreneurship development among its undergraduates.
Using similar “Reality-Learning” projects in schools would provide more opportunities for young students to interact with people and organizations in an active manner, for example: presentations, research interviews, fielding questions, selling, persuading, debating…etc.
The entrepreneurial spirit is better served through regular encounters by design with the unknown, unpredictable and uncomfortable. Entrepreneurship is about embracing permanent change in the real-world VUCA marketplace characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity; as well as learning to reach beyond our grasp for solutions.
