Mass mobilisation for entrepreneurship
NIGEL CLARKE is right about the Jamaican attitude towards people who own businesses that go belly up. Rather than seeing failure as one potential outcome of capitalist risk-taking, it’s often conflated with a character flaw, and entrepreneurial stumbles treated as events at which to snigger, if not openly mock.
Or, as Dr Clarke, the finance minister, put it, failure isn’t construed as “part of the route to success”.
“We see failure as an end in itself,” he told a conference promoting innovation and entrepreneurship in Jamaica and the Caribbean. So, people shy away from risk-taking for fear of being laughed at, or thought less of, if they aren’t successful. Which, in turn, weakens innovation, with a knock-on effect on economic growth and job creation.
“We want an environment where our young people have every incentive to go out there and fail, fail fast, and get up and go again,” said Dr Clarke. So, too, does this newspaper.
Indeed, this is an issue about which many people in Jamaica have talked for a long time, achieving, at best, only a slow, incremental shift in attitudes, despite growth in high-school and university courses in business and management and an expansion in investment opportunities.
The attitude of which Dr Clarke laments is, of course, part of the legacy of the social, political and economic history of Jamaica and the Caribbean. It is perhaps not surprising that in post-slavery societies, people may be entrepreneurially risk averse, preferring what they perceive to be stable, assured employment, or professional qualifications. And when they venture into businesses, it is mostly in enterprises considered easy and safe.
That is hardly the approach that will deliver to Jamaica a fit-for-purpose economy, capable of competing in a 21st-century global market. Transformation is important.
Dr Clarke, in his speech, sketched the contours of an approach for this change, which includes shifting the rules to allow pension funds, which are now barred from this kind of investment, to allocate up to five per cent of their portfolios to venture capital. That, potentially, would release J$27 billion into start-ups. He also talked of helping to link knowledge with opportunities, and of launching a programme of testimonials, where celebrated entrepreneurs talk about their – failures, not only of their successes.
MORE DEMANDED
We support that platform. However, the circumstances demand more if Jamaica is to evolve, relatively quickly, into a culture in which, as Dr Clarke said, “Our young people have every incentive to go out there and fail, fail fast, and get up and go again.”
The urgency implied in that remark suggests that any formal, academy-centred effort to build an entrepreneurial, risk-taking culture be underpinned by a mass-mobilisation/education programme from which Jamaicans should find themselves inescapable. For instance, few Jamaicans, including those in business, know anything about the updated insolvency/ bankruptcy law of 2014 and how it might be leveraged to help troubled firms reorganise themselves. Indeed, its regimes have hardly been tested so as to determine their efficacy.
No one has talked about it– at least not loudly, or consistently. Nor do we talk sufficiently about one of the central pillars of America’s economic success – that willingness of people to fail fast at business and to try again. For while no more than 20 per cent of start-ups make it past their first year, and only one-third reach year five, the odds that entrepreneurs will succeed usually improve with their subsequent tries.