eBusiness Weekly
Dr Charles Dahwa
Patriotic Entrepreneurship — Part 7
Although entrepreneurship is widely taught in most business schools worldwide, little attention is given to the role of patriotism.
In teaching entrepreneurship, business schools prefer to include topics such as business ethics, social responsibility and corporate governance in an effort to ensure businessmen and women operate businesses responsibly, transparently, sustainably and that they are accountable. But why the role of patriotism is overlooked is quite surprising.
Academia and business people both strongly acknowledge that businesses do not operate in a vacuum nor do they operate just to satisfy their own corporate objectives but in addition, business also exists to address the needs of the nation and societies they operate in. By drawing on this societal function of business, it is quite apparent we can leverage on patriotism to enhance business ethics, social responsibility, corporate governance and ultimately spur entrepreneurship.
For the avoidance of doubt, we could ask; how can a business person act responsibly and transparently in the market and be accountable if they are not patriotic about the national socio-economic development and the general well-being of the society they live in and serve?
Clearly, if patriotism is all about being strongly passionate and sacrificial about the success of one’s country and her people, of which it is, then it should be seen to positively influence responsible market behaviour, business ethics, corporate governance and ultimately spur entrepreneurship. Yet patriotism is largely omitted in the entrepreneurship discourse.
Sadly, in our country, we are continuing to witness high levels of a lack of patriotism from some members of our business community as well as some individuals.
The ongoing price madness and underhand dealings to manipulate our local currency are testimony to unpatriotic pricing, unpatriotic market behaviour as well as the adverse impact of an unpatriotic currency, the US dollar.
It is, therefore, in this context that by writing this series article, “Patriotic entrepreneurship-key to socioeconomic development”, I seek to share with you several factors that we should consider for us to teach, foster, strengthen and defend patriotic entrepreneurship in our country.
I have since shared eight factors, namely, Patriotic Business Motivation, Patriotic Production, Patriotic People Management, Patriotic Pricing, Patriotic Marketing, Patriotic Market Behaviour, Patriotic Currency.
In this part 7 of the series article, I want to share the roles of Patriotic Entrepreneur Development and Patriotic Knowledge Creation.
It is agreed worldwide that entrepreneurship is of crucial economic significance, for example, it creates employment, produces wide range of products and services, thus contributing to the GDP of economies.
Consequently, entrepreneurship development policy features very strongly in national socio-economic development policies worldwide. However, without the entrepreneur, there can be no entrepreneurship to talk about.
This is because it is the entrepreneur who should firstly be willing and capable to take the risk to either discover or create profitable and sustainable entrepreneurial opportunities. Entrepreneurs exploit such opportunities leading to the founding of new businesses and continuous provision of innovative products and services.
Therefore, key questions in entrepreneurship development include what kind of entrepreneurship to develop. What type of entrepreneurs to come up with, teach, foster and develop?
Addressing the above questions lead us to consider the difference between opportunity entrepreneurship and necessity entrepreneurship. Put simply, opportunity entrepreneurship refers to voluntary decision to venture into business being largely attracted by long-term profitable and scalable business opportunities.
Individuals who voluntarily get into business are thus known as opportunity entrepreneurs, having preferred profit over wage/salary. In sharp contrast, necessity entrepreneurship refers to venturing into business largely because one is forced by some negative factors, such as economic hardship, failure to secure employment amongst other negative externalities. Such individuals are commonly known as necessity entrepreneurs.
As is quite apparent, opportunity entrepreneurship is predominantly associated with much risk taking, knowledge exploration and exploitation, creativity, innovation, growth, higher employment creation as well as greater impact on socio-economic development. Conversely, necessity entrepreneurship is mostly renowned for survivalist business ventures, limited business growth and lower employment creation: mostly self-employed.
Considering the benefits for opportunity entrepreneurship by far outweigh those derived from necessity entrepreneurship, the norm is for countries to come up with entrepreneurship development policies that are largely focused on promoting more opportunity entrepreneurs than necessity entrepreneurs.
Put in other words, entrepreneurship development policies should result in more individuals making voluntary choices to become entrepreneurs and not getting forced to do this. Of course, both opportunity and necessity entrepreneurs are crucial in an economy and what a nation needs to do is to configure the right proportion of such entrepreneurs and therefore, more effectively allocate resources to develop each category of entrepreneurs accordingly.
Notably, assigning economic resources which are ideal for developing opportunity entrepreneurs to necessity entrepreneurs and vice versa is great misalignment of strategic resources and national strategic objectives: The result is national economic inefficiency and ineffectiveness!
Building on the above logic, I am pleased to further submit that not only should a nation decide on the proportion of opportunity entrepreneurs to necessity entrepreneurs but should also importantly factor in the inevitable role of patriotism.
For the avoidance of doubt, I reiterate what I have mentioned on several occasions that patriotism is totally different from partisan politics. In this regard, it is unpatriotic to allocate economic resources, which are scarce for that matter, to some individuals on the basis of political affiliation, without a well-informed entrepreneurship development policy.
Consequently, I argue that the effectiveness of our entrepreneurship development policy as a nation is also very much demonstrated by the extent to which we incorporate patriotism as we explore and ascertain what proportions of opportunity entrepreneurs to develop vis-à-vis necessity entrepreneurs.
It is also of paramount importance that we are very clear in terms of what ages of our people do we want to direct our opportunity entrepreneurship development programmes. Entrepreneurship studies refer this as entrepreneurial age population. Clearly, it is more strategic and beneficial if we are to start targeting ages as young as 10 than for us to direct our opportunity entrepreneurship development programmes to those who are 80 years and above.
Equally, it is crucial that we have in place a clear-cut framework that assesses key opportunity and necessity entrepreneurial characteristics thus accordingly categorize our people into necessity versus opportunity entrepreneurs.
Failure to incorporate patriotism in our entrepreneurship development policy implies greater risk of ineffective resource utilization, weakening the vibrancy of our entrepreneurship ecosystem and the overall sustainability of our national entrepreneurship development. To demonstrate this threat: 1).
What shall we as a nation benefit in the long-/term if after utilising our national and individual family resources to educate students up to college or university level, teach, coach, and or mentor prospective entrepreneurs; our school/college/university leavers/graduates and our prospective and nascent entrepreneurs go on to emigrate to foreign nations?
Worse still, they become permanent residents and citizens of such foreign nations and their innovations are patented in foreign economies. Of course it is the right of every citizen / national to pursue their life dreams but patriots always have the benchmark of national interests.
2). What shall we benefit as a nation when after starting and growing new ventures (some within key strategic sectors of our economy) our entrepreneurs go on to live abroad, become permanent residents and citizens of foreign nations?
3). Alternatively, such entrepreneurs go on to sell majority shareholding to foreign nationals? The new foreign shareholders who naturally need not be patriotic about Zimbabwe can direct these once Zimbabwean businesses, which are now businesses in Zimbabwe, in a totally different trajectory altogether; for instance, a trajectory that borders on constraining new business entrance into the sector and or a trajectory that seeks to circumvent national interests.
I could go on raising questions, but the point is, without a very strong module on patriotic entrepreneurship, our nation will continue to produce school leavers, college and university graduates whose predominant ideology is that they can only make it in life as entrepreneurs or employees only if they emigrate to the collective west foreign nations, especially the USA and the UK.
This is not only an ideology prevalent in students, but also in many parents. The biggest challenge is that when our entrepreneurs become foreign nationals, their innovations and creativity become foreign and we pay dearly to use their innovations.
While it is indeed memorable to read about how Zimbabwean born entrepreneurs are doing great in foreign nations, inventing this and that, innovating here and there, sadly, the net effect remains this good feeling of celebrating the success of our fellow ex-citizen. Where it matters most, that is, significant impact on our socio-economic development, our nation benefits very little, if anything at all.
The next key driver for patriotic entrepreneurship I want to share is patriotic knowledge creation and management. As is commonly understood, our education and daily life experiences serve as reservoirs where we derive skills, facts, and information, which all is knowledge. We can consciously and unconsciously create knowledge, and the knowledge-creation process involves an initial stage of acquiring knowledge and information.
This can be done through reading, listening, watching and even networking. Next stage is to apply such acquired knowledge striving to solve problems. Finally, we assess the impact or outcomes and learn from experience, thus storing such into our cumulative knowledge bank or database.
As is quite clear, knowledge needs managing, and this generally involves three phases: Accumulation, Storing and Sharing.
I have no issues at all with all the above knowledge creation and knowledge management processes, for we are proficient in them. The challenge and indeed a very strong threat to our national entrepreneurship development, which I observe is that, we look down upon our very own heritage-based knowledge management frameworks.
A dominant view not only in our nation but most developing economies, especially Africa, I would argue, is that, foreign knowledge creation and management frameworks, particularly those from the USA and UK are superior to our very own. Consequently, we continue to witness a sad situation where by as an African interacts in the global village and knowledge space, they tend to forget that competition of ideas, culture, and national interests are prevalent and permanent.
Further, many tend to interact in the global village and competitive knowledge space from a predominant perspective of ‘being empty’ or ‘void of knowledge’, yet none of us are of ‘blank minds’/’blank knowledge’ (tabula rasa).
The situation is worsened by the historic position that the white people, centuries ago took, that is, ‘an African is inferior’. Consequently, in the global village and the diverse, dynamic and competitive knowledge space, the collective west nations are known to aggressively push down their knowledge frameworks, culture and national interests, prescribing them on African knowledge seekers.
It is also an open secret how numerous inventions and innovations done by Africans (black people) have for decades remained hidden, only a few are now being unearthed and reported on, mostly by some patriotic African scholars.
Given the above, I, therefore, argue that without patriotic knowledge creation and management, our entrepreneurship development remains critically challenged. How can we as Zimbabweans come up with effective heritage based new product development when a significant view amongst us labels our very own culture and heritage as demonic and or backward?
How can we come up with novel Zimbabwean brands when we continue to trivialize our very own national languages? Our children protest: ‘Why should I study Shona or Ndebele, given its useless, even, to apply for a job it is not required!’. Why do we have to think in English first to be creative and not in our own national languages?
How can we come up with groundbreaking heritage based medical solutions when we continuously associate our African — Zimbabwean herbalists with evil, black magic, and or witchcraft? Covid-19 came, and although lacking our own quality framework to certify, many of us Africans simply relied on our strong faith in Western medical standards, thus got vaccinated. Ironically, we trivialized whatever insights were emanating from our own African continent.
Further, how can we as Zimbabweans have strategic knowledge creation and management, when all we aspire the most is to have a scholarship abroad, and become a foreign permanent citizen. Continentally, how can we surely excel in knowledge creation and management when a dominant disposition within our private and public sectors in Africa is to engage researchers and consultants from collect west companies and organizations, while looking down upon our very own African knowledge entrepreneurs?
In our nation Zimbabwe, it is not surprising to hear the remark ‘Aaaah zvemubhoyi here, hapana chinobuda’, that is, ‘nothing good comes out from the workmanship of a servant/slave (i.e. the black man)’: This is quite common.
To conclude, therefore, I argue that patriotic knowledge creation and management seeks to interrogate our heritage-based knowledge, innovate accordingly, and foster the same in our students, prospective and practicing entrepreneurs.
Importantly, premising on patriotic knowledge creation and management our students, prospective and practicing entrepreneurs shall engage in the dynamic global village and knowledge space, from a perspective of comprehensive self-identity.
Being proudly Zimbabwean, founding and growing business ventures that significantly impact positively on our socio-economic development.
Notably, such entrepreneurs shall have great potential to predominantly love and strategise to stay at home and in restructuring their business ventures, national interests always play a key role.
Dr Charlie provides cutting edge consultancy in Entrepreneurship and Business Management. Importantly, SME growth, policy and development is central to his work. Dr Charlie holds a B. Com Marketing Degree — Zimbabwe Open University, MBA — Africa University and a PhD in Management from Manchester Metropolitan University, (UK). He is contactable on Email: [email protected] Mobile: +263 71 370 2933
