Essay on Technology, International Entrepreneurship and Economic Development
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Part A.
Analysing the Entrepreneur – Mr. Jack Dorsey.
Jack Dorsey was born in St. Louis, Missouri, a son to Tim and Marcia Dorsey, on November 19, 1976, and Grew up in St. Louis (Kamberg, et al, 2012). Dorsey is of English, Irish and Italian descent. Mr. Dorsey worked sporadically as a fashion model during his younger days and at just 15 years of age, Dorsey became interested in programming and software development (Burgess, et al, 2020). At a very young age, while Jack Dorsey was still a student at Bishop DuBourg high school he became fascinated about communication and computer he, therefore, started programming where he developed a dispatch routine for taxis. In 1995 Dorsey enrolled at the University of Missouri-Rolla and later transferred to New York University in 1997 where he later dropped out after just two years of study and only one semester short of graduation.
With the massive technological challenge that was facing the cab drivers, delivery vans companies and drivers and other fleets of vehicles in reaching their customers in real-time, he got motivated about the technological challenge and programmed software that coordinated taxi drivers, distribution vans, and other fleets of automobiles that required to remain in constant, real-time communication with one another and their customers (Brown, pp56, 2017). At this stage, he was also venturing into other developments and concepts such as networks of medical devices and frictionless market service (Meskó, pp75, 2013). Dorsey was motivated by Live journal and AOL instant messenger and came up with a program that would combine his earlier broad reach of dispatch software with the ease of instant messaging which would allow one to share their status and allow their friends and relatives to know what they are doing at real-time and location of where they are (Niguidula, et al, 2017).
The theory surrounding the concept and question of, are entrepreneurs born or made? Is very complex and can only be understood and answered when we look at the debate surrounding nature vs nurturer and looking at the factors beyond entrepreneurship is key to the answerer (Shane, 2010). For example, twins share DNA however, they might have experienced unalike surroundings and childhood which can influence their entrepreneurial abilities (Suresh and Ramraj, 2012). Entrepreneurial ability among twins can be explained in four major entrepreneurial qualities which are both believed to increase the likelihood of becoming an entrepreneur, while also being genetical (Cavusgil and Knight, pp7, 2015).
a) The Probability of Opening A Business. To proponent of this idea, genes can influence the ability of a person to start a business i.e., twins from a successful business family are believed to inherit the same traits from their parents and continue the entrepreneurial skills however it is not clear that to what extend can the external environment affect this trait (Coviello, pp19, 2015).
b) Ability to Recognise Innovative Opportunities. Being an entrepreneur is based on the ability to identify and exploit appropriately new business opportunities to maximize profit and this trait is also believed to be heritable and can affect the ability of one to be an entrepreneur.
c) The Tendency to Become Self-Employed. Self-employment is associated with once able to use the relevant resources to come up with new ideas that can result in one being self-employed by creating a job for themselves. However, this trait can be limited and affected by external factors especially if there very limited resources to use and a favourable environment (Coviello, pp21, 2015).
d) Extroversion. Extroverts have no difficulties in making friends and it is this trait that can influence their intrapreneurial ability since they can make the connection and through these connections, they can become entrepreneurs if they can identify new opportunities.
The above traits focus on the entrepreneurs as a group however they lose the focus on how successful they were. Nonetheless, provided that genes are integral in the likelihood of actual business start-up the question is will the business be successful (Suresh and Ramraj, 2012). According to my understanding and the analysis of Mr. Jack Dorsey regardless of one heritage, one can become what one wants in life subsequently the chance of starting and making a business success is a choice (Shane, 2010). i.e., the least hereditarily likely entrepreneurs can become successful if they spend enough time improving their skills, gaining experience as entrepreneurs, and obligating themselves to new concepts.
Entrepreneurs in their daily activities take the maximum risk in their quest to become the best in their field of entrepreneurship. According to Saras D. Sarasvathy What makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial is based on two analogies i.e., Causal reasoning and Effectual reasoning. She argues that the concept is founded on the fact that there are predetermined goals with a given set of means which seeks to find the ideal, cheapest, fastest, and the utmost effectual way to attain the set goals (Carree, Verheul, pp381, 2012). Moreover, the concept involves the creation of additional alternative means to achieve the given goals. Unlike casual reasoning, effectual reasoning begins with a given set of means and allows goals to emerge contingently over time from the diverse imagination and diverse ambitions of the founders and the people they network with (Carree and Verhaul, pp386, 2012) e.g., Jack Dorsey his ambitions and people he interacted with enabled him to grow his ideas into something big from scratch without any predetermined goals.
Each decision you make at your business might address a specific problem or need in a department, but all decisions can affect the main goal of any company – profitability, for example, Return on Investment, Effect on Resources, Lost Opportunity Cost, Image, and Brand Impact (Wood and Williams, pp590, 2014) etc. below are the most considered factors that influence the decision making of entrepreneurs.
Mr. Jack Dorsey overcame the odds and built a massive social media platform by just having an idea of connecting taxi drivers and customers. Ideas, ambitions, and people we interact with are the most important treasures in building an empire (Shepherd et al, 2015). It is important to note that continuous innovation to new ideas is the key to a better future just like Dorsey had an idea of connecting taxi drivers, he built what remains to date the most important mechanism in the transport system as well as the communication world which has eased the life of many people in the world.
Part B.
Technology Entrepreneurship.
Technology entrepreneurship can be defined in many ways, for example, an agency that is distributed across different kinds of actors, each of which becomes involved with technology and, in the process, generates inputs that result in the transformation of an emerging technological path (Bailetti, 2012). Secondly, Ways in which entrepreneurs draw on resources and structures to exploit emerging technology opportunities (Giones, 2017).
With the continuous disruption of technology over the past few years, it is clear that entrepreneurs need to pay more attention to the ever-changing and evolving technological trends to create a more dynamic workplace powered by a productive team. Below are some of the technological trends for future entrepreneurs.
a) No-Code Development, this idea is based on the assumption that users will not need to write down any single code however they will be able to build and launch applications according to what they require and not using the programming code (Brown and Mason, 2014).
b) Blockchain. This trend is considered the utmost influential high-tech trend for future exploitation by tech companies, it is based on the idea that most companies will require to develop or adopt a new method of transactions that will only be accessible online i.e., a digital ledger that is duplicated and distributed across the entire network on a blockchain (Ferreira, et al, pp729 2016).
c) Ethics Around Digital Privacy, privacy is becoming a big concern to most users as they tend to inquire where their data is used and where it goes after use. This has brought a massive headache to the tech companies and therefore it still requires better innovation on how to address the issue of digital privacy (Mosey, Guerrero and Greenman 2017).
Mr. Jack Dorsey is both tech and social in nature, this is true to say that after developing a multibillion-dollar company he is much concerned and continued to engage in social activities to improve people’s lives across the world i.e., during the green revolution in Iraq when twitter was scheduled to shut down their servers for maintenance, he agreed to the request to delay the maintenance as Twitter was the main platform the Iranians used to communicate and coordinate and this show how committed he is to the society at large. Nonetheless, Mr. Dorsey has constantly been involved in several charity and donations to various organizations, just recently he pledges a 1 billion dollars donated to charity to help combat the coronavirus pandemic. This clearly shows how important he has become to the world both technologically, economically, politically, and socially.
Concerning the above definitions of technology entrepreneurship, it is important to note that technology is regularly and has constantly grown to be part of human daily life that we cannot ignore the relationship it has to our social, economic, and political life. The development of software that linked the taxi drivers and their customers, was crucial to the development of transport and communication, in general, proved the underlying gap that existed between technology and infrastructure. Entrepreneurs are therefore should keep the innovations going and pull resources together to tackle the new trends that are constantly growing in the field of technology just as dictated by the definition of technology.
with the above illustrations, it is true to confirm that the definition of a technology entrepreneur and the theme above (technology entrepreneurship) are closely related to the literature in part A.
Course Work II
International Entrepreneurship & Economic Development.
Abstract.
Disruption of technology, economic fluctuations, changes in demography are some of the factors that have come with new opportunities and threats for various organizations and have transformed almost all societies across the world (Naudé, 2011). The importance of entrepreneurship cannot be ignored by both private and public sectors, governments, and the general public in dealing with these emerging changes(Terjesen, Hessels and Li, 2016). Entrepreneurship is a complex occurrence that can be analysed as a progression of a resource or a state-of-being. According to the Schumpeterian view, the entrepreneurial process institutes one of the crucial features in the economic growth of a nation (Zahra, Newey and Li, 2014). Nonetheless, there have been different opinions from researchers about the relationship between the stages of economic development and entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship as a concept is the capacity in addition to a willingness to advance, shape and run a business initiative, together with the bottlenecks associated with it for profit-making (Dorin and Alexandru 2016). However, some definitions are related to the functional role of an entrepreneur i.e., coordination, innovation, capital supply, decision making. These roles include risk sicking, innovativeness, and opportunity sicking (Eisenmann, 2013). opening a software shop can be a good example of such entrepreneurship.
Below are four major types of entrepreneurship that can be used to explain further the concept of entrepreneurship. Firstly, small business entrepreneurship. These are businesses that are mostly funded by small business loans from SACCOs or friends and the generated profits are majorly for the sustainability of family and not making huge unimaginable profits (Stam and Van Stel, pp79, 2011). They are mostly ruined by the local employees or family members, they include travel agents, grocery stores, carpenters, hairdressers, etc. secondly, scalable start-up entrepreneurship. This scalable entrepreneurship is started with the mentality and vision of changing the world. These businesses hire workers based on experience and they require lots of capital to run and sustain their project. Capital investments are based on the willingness of investors to invest in the business(Stam and Van Stel, pp81, 2011). Thirdly, large company entrepreneurship. These corporations or companies have a specific product that they revolve around by bringing to the market new and innovative products of similar character to that of the main product. With constant change i.e., customers’ preference, technology, and competition from other companies pressure the companies to come up with an innovative product and then sell it. Lastly, social entrepreneurship. These are businesses that are mainly set for helping the larger society and not to make any profit and the production of goods and services are based on the social needs of the community (Aulet, and Murray, 2013).
Linking International Entrepreneurship with Economic Development.
An entrepreneur has remained a central agent in most of the manufacture, supply, and developmental theories. According to Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of long waves, “Everyone is an entrepreneur when he carries out new combinations”. economic development is based on the idea that entrepreneurial discoveries are the forces that drive the economy as a result of a combination of factors of production (Kiss, Danis, and Cavusgil 2012). Scholars have viewed entrepreneurship as on several occasions being too restricted to developments and creations of business platforms.
New views have expanded to view entrepreneurship more properly as a social occurrence that reflects the institutional characteristics of a larger society and not as a business creation platform or innovations (Toma, Grigore and Marinescu, pp40, 2014). Most research has suggested that entrepreneurship is mainly focused on success as measured by profit. However, this might not be the case to some extend since entrepreneurship is viewed as a catalytic agent towards mechanical revolution and institutional growth (LU, et al, 2010). Going by the definition entrepreneurship describes entrepreneurial opportunities broadly as compared to its usual literature definition and understanding (Shane and Venkataraman, 2000) define opportunity as when goods can be sold at a profit. However, from a development perspective, the definition is insufficient since it points toward the assumption that values from entrepreneurship are subjected to financial advantages only.
Entrepreneurship according to the economic theory is labelled as a professional choice amongst wage employment and self-employment and this will only work for some people if the benefits collected from self-employment exceeds the wage income. It is important to note that self-employment is not by choice but by necessity and thus there should be a distinction between opportunity entrepreneur and necessity (Kiss, Danis, and Cavusgil 2012). Some scholars view an entrepreneur as a manager of manufacturing and representative of change i.e., the contribution of entrepreneurship to economic development is viewed as important at the very late stage of development where knowledge and competition are considered to be the driving force of economic development this is because growth can only be determined by factors gathered (Shepherd and Patzelt, 2011)
Below are some of the contributing factor’s entrepreneurship can subsidize to brighten economic development.
i. Entrepreneurship and Mechanical Financial Transformation.
This factor is based upon the illustration that transformation should be done at the lowest level of production i.e., transforming businesses from a lower-income, traditional economy to a modern economy involves significant modification to methods of production (Wolf-Powers, et al, pp370, 2017). This process will require that the entrepreneurs perform both the essential roles i.e., provision of transitional ideas, ensuring a constant rise in productivity and employment. In mechanical transformation entrepreneurial capacity has been given the most integral part in the transformation, nonetheless, entrepreneurial capacity is the determinant of how fast or slow the technological change will take (López, 2015). i.e., a rapid expansion of skilled labour can only be absorbed if the entrepreneurial ability is high, and that without entrepreneurial ability the returns to physical and human capital is low.
The production of intermediate goods of a particular economy is expected not to be of limited range as this will result in the usage of the production method that the resulting product will be of lower quality and will have little demand for sophisticated new inputs. This move will scare out any potential investor who had previously shown the intention of setting up their farms in the area (Shepherd and Patzelt, 2011). However, with improved production of new intermediate goods, there will be high demand by the final good producer for more production hence increasing the likelihood of attracting more entrepreneurs to set up their farms due to high demand for quality goods (Wolf-Powers, et al, pp370 2017). Finally, an aspect of contrast that is predominantly relevant to the discussion on entrepreneurship in growth is that amid the formal and informal sectors. The informal sector does not play by the rules and avoids paying taxes or regulations.
ii. Multi-Dimensional Growth and Entrepreneurship.
This factor is generally associated with entrepreneurship literature. Generally, entrepreneurship literature has always taken a controlled understanding of growth and development (Mills, pp670, 2017). Most pragmatic studies regarding the connection between entrepreneurship and development have always been restricted to gross domestic products (GDP), output, and employment growth as substitutions for development and this is not the case with multi-dimensional growth (López, 2015). Nonetheless, it is true to say that entrepreneurship can also contribute the multi-dimensional growth through personal culpability. This approach assumes that entrepreneurship is just like another human being that can offer services and therefore can be valued as an end and not as a means to the end (Thirunavukkarasu and Chennakrishnan).
Multi-dimensional growth and entrepreneurship can improve human abilities in case people’s complementary skills are to be extended allowing them to choose whether they want to be entrepreneurs. According to the instrumentalists, demand for the entrepreneurs has not been considered a derived demand (Shah and Saurabh, 2015). If everybody was to be happy this would increase the number of entrepreneurs hence reducing the number of economic developments since there will be no more human resource to work in various industries.
iii. Market Failures, The State and Entrepreneurship.
The state and the market play an important role in the determination of the level of economic growth of a country as they are both used to measure the level of development or underdevelopment i.e., this factor is based on the idea that there should be a reduction of government participation in the market and loosening of the market (van der Vossen and Stavropoulos). The constraints imposed by the state are a major hindrance to the forthcoming of the entrepreneurs and therefore loosening the state interference would encourage them.
The role of the market is very critical and each state should work towards addressing these failures that have plagued the intrapleural activities such as innovation activities and the ability to start-up their entrepreneurship (Thirunavukkarasu and Chennakrishnan). The gap that exists needs a clear clarification on these roles that the market has failed to secure this has become a problem to numerous states affecting different sectors of the market.
Private sectors have shown laxity in targeting various entrepreneurs in some specific sectors or industries for fear of distorting the markets through the application of private-sector development policies (Mills, pp678, 2017). The fear of government failure especially fearing the potential for such selective support to encourage rent-seeking and corruption. The design of entrepreneurship policies is therefore a delicate art and one that needs more serious scrutiny (Wolf-Powers, et al, pp379 2017).
Entrepreneurial behaviour between men and women has attracted great attention across the world given the key role women play in the market especially in developing countries and is mostly associated with discrimination against women (Shah and Saurabh, 2015). These differences include, firstly, it is always believed that businesses owned by women are always smaller and provide less employment growth unlike those that are owned by men which significantly employ a great number of the labour market (Sonobe, pp17, 2018). Secondly, in terms of profitability, women-owned business is less profitable since they are small in nature unlike those that are owned by men and generally generate lower sales turnover than those of men (Shah and Saurabh, 2015).
The above differences in entrepreneurial tendency and performance reflect a great disadvantage and discernment both in the labour market and education (Mills, pp675, 2017). Discrimination of women in the entrepreneurial field has come with great effect to those women who are less talented not to engage in entrepreneurship as they will opt for self-employment while those women who are highly talented will end up in the labour market (Sonobe, pp20, 2018). Furthermore, it is true then that lack of self-confidence is a major problem which is stopping women of all level in entering into the entrepreneurial activities in the developing countries.
Enhancing the Developmental Impact of Entrepreneurship.
Promoting innovative entrepreneurship in developing countries is under great threat this is because there is a lack of sufficient impact evaluation that can be used to evaluate what works and what does not work in different parts of the world (Taatila, 2010). There has not been enough stimulation of innovation in most of the developmental agencies, private sector development programs this need to improve and not constant improvement of the general business environment (Dhahri and Omri, pp69, 2018 ). There should be an improvement in the quality of entrepreneurial capacity and not only improving the education and skills of the entrepreneur, it is for a fact that innovative entrepreneurship is most desirable for growth.
In conclusion, reconsidering the role that entrepreneurship plays in development leads to three key aspects i.e., it offers a new viewpoint on the three ideas in international economic development. Entrepreneurship impacts growth outcomes both positively and negatively and lastly, entrepreneurship is in turn meaningfully determined by the activeness of the growth environment (Dhahri and Omri, pp75, 2018 ). Entrepreneurship is a lawful and a very important subject of study and discussion, similarly development is a meaningful subject of study for entrepreneurship and management. (Roberts and Eesley, 2011) The growing availability of more and better data from evolving and growing economies, the need for increased adoption of demanding assessment methods in policy evaluations, and the possibility and attractiveness of closer partnership across disciplines, are all boding well for the intersection of development and entrepreneurship
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