The creation and management of new ideas through a process of adding value to economic issues, produces overall benefits and gains, to both the consumers and the service providers in the society. This is primarily the root and ultimate essence of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship in other words means “creation of economic value that is all round beneficial to the user and profitable to the service/product provider who conceived, generated, created and innovatively initiated the new idea in the marketplace”. This service provider is the entrepreneur that has identified potential opportunities inherent in economic challenges of our contemporary society. He starts a business (with passion) and is ready to risk any loss from recognising opportunities; while targeting sustainable gains to make money as he innovatively implements creative ideas.
Great business entities have been established worldwide based on entrepreneurial capabilities exhibited by some globally acclaimed entrepreneurs. Among such businesses and brains behind them are Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, an internet entrepreneur and the CEO of Facebook; Bill Gates (William Henry Gates), former CEO of Microsoft; back home in Nigeria, we have the likes of Aliko Dangote, president and CEO of the Dangote Group (which includes the recently built greenfield refinery complex at Lekki, with 650,000 barrels per day, nameplate capacity). The Silicon Valley entrepreneurs include tech companies in the United States of America, with the area owned by several real estate companies/property owners; alongside big corporate names like Google, Intel, Apple, Cisco and Stanford University.
These entrepreneurs are business operators and promoters that have good intentions to improve living conditions by adding economic value to the existing goods and services in the market. These entrepreneurs strategically initiate this with passion and enthusiasm, through innovative visions seen and recognised as opportunities alongside the challenges facing the society. These inherent opportunities are intelligently identified, invariably propelling witty inventions, and created to benefit the larger society for man’s wellbeing. Such intellectual properties are of course patented, to earn huge royalties for the inventors who successfully made such feats that support and improve life.
Presently in the country, as we collectively talk about good governance, Nigeria’s economy needs Social Entrepreneurship most, at this critical moment of hyperinflation, with very weak local currency exchange rates, and unsustainable interest rates for international trades/businesses; with hope to revamp the economy to thrive subsequently. With the ongoing disruptive business trends within the economy, if the managers of this economy meant well to achieve positive impact on this economically vulnerable society in the near future, it is again social entrepreneurship that can strategically straighten and blaze the trail to fix, reposition, and ideologically restore the vibrancy of these economic concepts. Futuristically, it can only be hoped that this will be felt in Small Business Entrepreneurship, Large Company Entrepreneurship and the Scalable Start-up Entrepreneurship in the economy, to deliver real economic growth and overall national development.
The work of social entrepreneurship is solely the duty and responsibilities of those in leadership, the public servants (both the elected and the appointed) at all levels and in different economic sectors (as agents of change, that ought to change the narrative within the ailing nation’s economy). The expected positive impact should not be anticipated from outside but by the economic decision makers who are already operating at various points and places of authority.
Deep discussions and brainstorming sessions should constantly take place amongst the various organs/arms of the government agencies, departments and regulatory bodies. These institutions dish out policies and programmes that shape the economy because it is the government’s pronouncements, legislations and decisions taken that instantly determine the extent of economic performances, impact and the dimension of actual growth rate that are recorded by the economy. Such outcome, of course, is also based on the extant laws that influence daily economic and commercial activities that those in the private sector operate on, by complying without much resistance (favourably or unfavourably). It is therefore noteworthy to recognise the following economic concepts – Scarcity, Incentives, Costs and Benefits, Supply and Demand – that are critical in driving decisions, and at the same time, influencing the actions of entrepreneurs in the society. The government ultimately needs to urgently lessen the economic burdens on the citizens, who are presently classified as suffering multidimensional poverty, even more so since the removal of the fuel subsidy.
The mere fact that the study of economics borders on scarcity and choice among people that live and interact by exchange of goods and services for a value makes it the responsibility of the government to ensure sustainable supplies of essential services and provision of the basic utilities/items that support daily living within the society. It is, therefore, on these concepts, which include demand and supply, that the economy could start loosening its negative economic grips on her citizenry. Nigerian leaders are therefore urged to enthusiastically brace up and assume the place of exercising social entrepreneurship in their respective duty posts, to support and aid this economy attain amiable economic heights in the comity of nations in the global marketplace.
