“Entrepreneurial ventures are major driving factors of the modern economy since the dawn of industrialization.”
The modern economy doesn’t deserve its name if it is still the conventional way businessmen make business. Gone are the days when business owners call themselves businessmen and women, they are now entrepreneurs. What is the difference? To tell you honestly, they do not have a lot but they have a huge difference.
The growth of the modern economy in the Philippines, for example, for the last decade can be attributed more to these modern entrepreneurs. World Bank says that in recent years, the Philippine economy has made progress in delivering inclusive growth, evidenced by a decline in poverty rates and its Gini coefficient. Poverty declined from 23.3% in 2015 to 16.6% in 2018 while the Gini coefficient declined from 44.9 to 42.7 over the same period. This might be driven by different factors of course, but a chunk of this inflow comes from local entrepreneurs. A report of the Philippine Statistics Authority states that the Philippines posted a GDP growth rate of 5.8% in 2015, down from its 2014 GDP growth rate of 6.1%. From 2012 to 2015, the country reported an average GDP growth rate of 5.9%.
As one of the stars making our economy shines brighter, it is notably worth learning more about these entrepreneurial ventures and why they have a huge impact on our present and future economy.
Going back to the days when doing business is just copying what is trending in your area and offering more competitive prices or deals, business is done less innovatively. Time flies fast and here we are. Forget about what the other corner’s store offers because innovation is the new game. While a businessman starts his business by looking around the market and finding a venture he can invest in (e.g. retailing, franchising), an entrepreneur visits the market to look for the unsought. Entrepreneurs search for opportunities by asking themselves, what else does the customer need.
Depending upon the perspective you are looking at, entrepreneurs may be classified into different classification. One of the basic classifications is based on their purpose and structure. Small business entrepreneurship is your friend's typical newly founded backyard business that he got funded by relatives, friends, or a small personal loan. Remember that your friend is offering something innovative that sets him apart from a conventional business starter. Watch out for this friend’s venture for depending upon the creativity and precision he handles his horse; it may just be mainstream soon. Scalable startup entrepreneurship on the other hand is a real believer. The entrepreneurs behind these ventures believe in its bright future thus they aspire to scale up by inviting people to back them up (financially). They are also referred to as venture capitalists. Large company entrepreneurship is your favorite brand. The robust efforts in R&D of these large businesses enable them to study the market so well that their innovations and personalization do not have a chance to fail (my safe assumption). So, you think we are at the grandest of the scale until Social entrepreneurship pops up. Financially speaking they have no match with the legroom our prior featured type has but their impact on the customer cannot be discounted. They exist for society. Their innovative offerings are answers to the social quandaries for their aspirations root from these social needs.
Of these aforementioned venture types, social entrepreneurship is the one most focused on social needs and perhaps the most sensitive but small business and scalable startups contribute largely to societal growth. Remember your friend’s venture I told you a while ago? Your other neighbors and neighborhood come to know about it. As a result, your friend was able to hire people from your town. The uniqueness of your friend’s innovative venture made it talk of the town and now aspires more small individuals like him to innovate and start their ventures. Not only it promotes well-being but also it may promote tourism and other chain reactions that are positive and towards the progress of the society. Unlike large companies, the ease of getting involved in ventures by small and startup entrepreneurs are more convenient and accessible. After knowing this, an innovative idea sparks into your mind, and now you are ready to start your venture. Hold on for a while, apart from the social benefit of these ventures, economic effects hold more tales to be inspired about.
According to Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), as of 2018, 998,342, or 99.52 percent of the million or so businesses operating in the Philippines are micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs).
“In terms of value added, the MSME sector contributed 35.7 percent of the total with manufacturing contributing the largest share of 6.87 percent. Wholesale and retail trade and repair contributed 6.58 percent followed by financial intermediation with a share of 6 percent.”- Department of Trade and Industry Philippines Republic of the Philippines
According to DTI these modest ventures generated 5.71 million jobs, or more than half, 63.19 percent, of the country’s total employment. And micro-enterprises, the tiniest of these mini enterprises, accounted for the largest share of the employment generation, 28.86 percent, followed by small enterprises with 27.04 percent.
We can be inspired by these ventures that are socio-economic responsive and beneficial. We can safely say that the day for traditional business making that the only end-day target is to earn a profit is coming to dusk. The new dawn is breaking and it is for these entrepreneurial ventures.
The story of Oyo Hotel’s CEO Ritesh Agarwal is a highlighted example of a modern entrepreneur. Using his skill in technology and photography, he was able to salvage local hotel businesses that are on the brink of bankruptcy. Not only that, he was also able to provide hotel services to the local travelers prompting more access and comfort on tourists that bolster their tourism.
Chatfuel, a messaging bot platform that enables companies to create functional chatbots that help them in their online platforms, esp. E-Commerce is another exceptional example of innovative entrepreneurship. Who might have thought of a program that would aid human effort for businesses in interacting with clients? With their platform, many businesses were able to create a more open and accommodating experience with their clients. Not only that, Botanalytics, a company that measures the performance of chatbots published an article detailing how chatbots help boost the economy by expediting transactions between firms and their clients. It also helps to lessen the carbon footprints of the firms for conversations and transactions that require printed materials such as mails and quotations may optionally be delivered electronically.
Video blogs or vlogs may be very common in the modern era but more than their contextual benefits underly a more complex idea of how Youtube, a company under the umbrella of Google, creates a better future for us. Being the second most visited website by Alexa Internet, Youtube enables the inexpensive distribution of educational content and other beneficial information (e.g. news, updates). Worldwide video access has spurred innovation by enabling geographically distributed individuals to build upon each other's work, to collaborate, or to crowdsource. As Youtube is continuously building a fairer and safer online environment, its role in shaping our future is getting more and more vital.
Rapid modernization and globalization drive drastic changes on how our society responds to efforts put by entrepreneurs to sell their visions. As mentioned before, we are about to take a new chapter of our voyage towards a more immense and complex world of doing business. Entrepreneurial ventures that focus more on what clients need rather than what the company offers is getting the spotlight. More and more innovative products, ideas, and services are being born every day. Bearing this in mind, we must be riding with the wave as entrepreneurs. Clicking the search button while having the term “what’s in…” on the search box will not benefit us more today. We must rather start studying our surroundings and look for the opportunities that are present in our society. The method of buying by the consumer has been evolving and so your method of selling or perhaps determining what to sell shall evolve too.
