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The Entrepreneurship-Development Nexus

To all who think entrepreneurship has a purpose, a meaning and at least a semblance of truth, it is time to think what that means. This is our aim in this blog series on entrepreneurship and innovation for JEIEE. Meaning could be realised is by making entrepreneurship and innovation relevant to development.

By development we are referring to the embrace of an informed, holistic approach to the nurture, succor and advancement of people, their capabilities, their use of relevant technologies and forms of capital in varied environments. In other words we wish to encourage the wider adoption of development as a dynamic process as opposed to its common reductionist and static use (as in developed and developing economies) that does nothing more than to reinforce power games. A focus on process allows for the opportunity to recognize emergence, the essence of entrepreneurship and innovation.

So rather than simply to get another abstract understanding of new venture creation or product development we will consider how these contexts occur in economic and social development in multiple spaces. We could start a dialogue between those spaces to:

• Comprehend the richness and diversity of entrepreneurial experience in terms of what matters to people to;
• Provide platforms for exchange of practices other than deterministic country rankings of institutions, infrastructure, calibrated resource banks, governance, and a fixed propensity for entrepreneurship; and
• Scope out different models and practices of what constitutes entrepreneurial activity in terms of economic outcomes, social value creation, public interest and collective, community-based governance systems.

Differences in the concept and practice of entrepreneurship are important because needs and wants are context dependent and because their satisfaction are less a function of standardised models of growth.