Friends Great discussion on the above subject. Yes, we need entrepreneurs; and NO, not everyone can be one. In the latter case, we need risk capital and entrepreneurial injection to make the ideas a success. There is also a famous article that once appeared in Havard Business Review titled "Why Entrepreneurs Don't Scale"; they should hatch ideas, demonstrate that the ideas can be commercialized and step off and leave business leaders and managers scale up the business. We have a short supply of the latter and need to invest in their development. There is also the environment in which ideas thrive; a technical idea, hatched by a technical person doesn't necessarily turn out as would be intended. The path to development is a graveyard of many, many initiatives that started and died; but later some (with luck) are picked up by others that had a more well-rounded understanding of the same or when the right time had come. How do we increase the chances of success of ideas? I think we need to co-locate technical (e.g. product, service creation), business (business viability, etc.) and law (confines of law: securing IP, formalizing org, etc.) faculties/institutions. The informal interactions amongst students, researches, and faculty in these areas can be an incubation laboratory for many an enterprise. The knowledge exchange (informal and otherwise), relationships forged and trust engendered can be the foundation for long term business success. This suggests that they way we are building and deploying our institutes of higher learning and research doesn't fit with the above scenario. Example: faculty of commerce at UoN shouldn't have moved to Kabete but stayed alongside engineering or both should have moved to the same location; ditto for law. Someone once asked what happens when you put an engineer, sociologist, lawyer, accountant, etc together! The answer: something much bigger than the sum of the individual parts! We need environments where players (with difference background) can interact more and on an ongoing basis. Today, we have universities operating out of high-rise towers where students jet in for class and take off thereafter, with little time to be with colleagues, consult with faculty or simply hang out with others attending a seminar here or another there, in one's line of study or not. Ideally we need campus/research zones, complete with residential facilities, sports, seminar rooms, labs; alongside industrial parks and business advisory centres. Just some thoughts! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Matunda Nyanchama, mnyanchama@aganoconsulting.com Agano Consulting Inc.; www.aganoconsulting.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”- George Bernard Shaw ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This e-mail, including attachments, may be privileged and may contain confidential or proprietary information intended only for the addressee(s). Any other distribution, copying, use, or disclosure is unauthorized and strictly prohibited. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately by reply e-mail and permanently delete the message, including any attachments, without making a copy. Thank you.