entrepreneurship word cloud concept isolated on white

Seedstars Summit : Developing Entrepreuneurship

Latterly, a strong belief about entrepreneurship being a crucial driver of economic growth for both developed and emergent nations has emerged in people’s thoughts.  What is really entrepreuneurship and how does this new trend affect emergent countries ?


First, what is entrepreneurship? Entrepreneurship is the development of a business which comes from the collaboration of an innovation and a plan to exploit and turn it into a profitable business. Entrepreneurship entails recognizing the right opportunity, taking calculated risks, finding resources such as funding and tools to develop both the concept and the start-up.

Different types and degrees of innovation may take place in entrepreneurship: it could be process, market, product, factor, and even organizational innovation. Entrepreneurship is often viewed as an important component in stimulating the economic growth of a country.

Thus entrepreneurship will be very important for the next years, as it is actually playing a key role on a lot of domains. Here are the domains of innovations that are impacting the most our world nowadays: travel transports, education, consumer services, finance payments, medicine and social networking.

What about emergent countries? If you ask someone what those countries mean to him, most of the time the answer will be linked with war, corruption, famine or emergent firm factories. If you ask an entrepreneur, he will say that he sees opportunities and some open market with less competition. As an example did you know that four billion people still don’t have access to the internet in the world today? This means there are four billion potentially consumers! In Africa, about 30 % of the population has access to internet and only 17 % has a smartphone. But it is about to change: Africa’s mobile rate penetration will raise to 80 % in 2020. And it’s not an isolated case: Asia has a 40 % internet penetration and about 30 % smartphone penetration.

As in Europe or North America, many emergent countries have improved their national system of innovation by supporting business incubators with the main goal of overcoming some weaknesses in their institutional environments. The context in which innovation in emergent countries takes place is dominated by two global drivers. The first one is the intensification of the globalization process. It has reduced significantly time and distance throughout the world. The second global driver is the intensive ongoing technological change stimulated by scientific advances.

In this increasingly unequal world economy, several developing countries have experienced rapid economic catchup, including Chile, China, Korea and Taiwan… These countries were able to absorb and creatively adapt international technological knowledge and achieve accelerated growth.

Emergent countries have this desire to take part in an innovation process in order to elevate people‘s life and to develop their economy. A development strategy which encourages entrepreneurship will also focus on education, skills improvements and innovation. Such a focus will have effect not only on economic growth, but also on economic development and poverty.

Charles Gousset