Can we "Entrepreneur" our way out of bad leadership?
This post was inspired by a recent article on Quartz about Africa and how it can succeed through Entrepreneurship. The author writes:
“Development isn’t a linear process, and innovation and entrepreneurship alone won’t solve governance challenges or build strong political institutions. But market-creating innovations are often what begins the process of societal transformation, especially in poor countries. Though entrepreneurship is by no means a substitute for good governance, it is the best vehicle to achieve it.”
This resonates well with many Latin America countries where a big part of the economic and social stagnation comes from political institutions and their failure to adopt progressive policies that balance power with economic growth. Aside from Africa, Latin American countries have had the slowest growth and innovation of the entire world.
Entrepreneurship is not the absolute solution to poverty, but creating value comes from the most part from building businesses and shifting wealth into the hands of people that didn’t have access to it in the first place. Healthy capitalism with the right distribution, is a formula for value creation. With value creation comes prosperity.
A few organizations that are helping create and accelerate companies in Latin America. Just to mention a few:
Then, we have a some venture capitalist firms that are funding LatAm startups:
NXTP Labs
Softbank Innovation Fund (LatAm focused)
(Note: if you know other important organizations please send them)
There are other organizations out there helping as well, but Latin American needs even more. In the United States, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of organizations that help entrepreneurs build their companies. That is a lot more than what we see in Latin American countries, which combined have twice as much people as the US.
That’s not to say that there’s a direct correlation between the amount of organizations helping entrepreneurs and economic growth, but it certainly helps to have institutions created to support and encourage more entrepreneurship.
As big cities in the United States and Europe become more expensive to live in and immigration laws strengthened, it’s possible we begin to see a clear shift from entrepreneurs building their companies in their native countries rather than migrating to other parts of the world. In addition to this, it’s never been better to build companies remotely given how good remote-friendly tools have blossomed in the past few years.
Latin America needs more entrepreneurship to help beat economic slowdown and challenge the political status-quo into the future.