adminestablished intrapreneurs who are found in large organisations.
Intrapreneurs are the people who develop innovations mainly in large organisations and they are responsible for the growth of the firm. While this aspect of entrepreneurship appears not to be a major concept in Zimbabwe, I had an insightful experience about this phenomenon when I recently visited South Korea. I discovered that it was more respectable for the youth to go for a salaried job than running own firms.
This is because huge conglomerates such as Hyundai, Samsung and Daewoo dominate the Korean economy and are commonly referred to as the “chaebol” who have tentacles in all the sectors that matter.
The Economist magazine has observed that although the chaebol have played a vital role in South Korea’s development, they also suck up credit and obstruct the rise of start-ups. One of the biggest, Samsung, accounts for around a fifth of the country’s exports, the magazine said.
With very little room to manoeuvre parents of bright young Koreans typically steer them into steady careers in the chaebol, the government or the professions. It would appear that stability is their main concern and they have comfort that the conglomerates are locally owned.
However, widespread unemployment among the youth appears to be changing that mindset now given that 58 percent of Koreans aged between 25 and 34 have attended university, but 346 000
graduates are currently out of work, up from 268 000 two years ago. Some have become entrepreneurs out of necessity and almost 30 000 young South Koreans say they want to launch their own companies, one survey revealed. And according to the government, the number of “one-man creative enterprises” in the country has risen by 15 percent in the past year to 235 000.
What struck me during my one week stay in South Korea, is the people’s pride in what they have and spare no effort to ensure that they present a polished homegrown product. The level of development, particularly in terms of infrastructure is second to none and there is this insatiable appetite to continue growing.
Young entrepreneurs in Korea appear to have found a haven in tech fields such as social media or gaming, where the only barrier to entry is the power of your imagination. It is this sector that has seen the emergence of a breed of young entrepreneurs that is riding on the Internet boom.
They seem to be following the plan to start small and fizzy firms such as NHN, the operator of Naver (the “Korean Google”), and NCsoft, a maker of multi-player online role-playing games have now joined the big league. Each was once tiny but now belongs to the trillion-won club.
These new entrepreneurs are being joined by a growing band of foreigners, including ethnic Koreans from Western countries. Californian Koreans see no stigma in starting your own business. And they see South Korea, where the economy grew by 6,2 percent last year, as a land of opportunity compared with sluggish America. The country issues about 35 000 investor visas a year, mostly to small-scale entrepreneurs.
The Seoul Metropolitan Government’s Global Centre has recently been swamped by expats seeking to attend its classes on Korean business procedures and regulations. The city has also launched a “Youth 1 000 CEO Project”, to provide young entrepreneurs with free office space and grants of up to 1 million won per month. The real obstacle to enterprise according to the World Bank, is a society that urges its best young minds to aim low. Formal employment does not bring out the best in some of these bright young minds.
There is growing enterprise though in the SME sector where the manufacturing of machinery to produce consumer goods for both the local and export markets is massive. Family businesses in some cases have blossomed to emerge as major competitors on the global market.
Given this scenario it is increasingly becoming apparent that there is a lot to learn from the Korean development model focussing on utilising home grown solutions to our problems.
In Zimbabwe we appear to have been poisoned by the Western concept that we must go to school and on completion look for employment.
Looking at our unemployment figures, this could explain why there is so much discontent among the youth because when they grew up they expected the system to create jobs for them. They were never taught that they could actually create the jobs themselves.
So much has been said about overhauling the curricular in our schools to ensure that on graduating from tertiary institutions or university for that matter, the youth should be geared to be creative enough to start their own ventures. The Government on its part should chip in by providing an enabling environment for start up business ventures.
As always let’s make money.
Online Reporter