Entrepreneurship seeks to overcome difficulty in pursuing a goal that serves a purpose. If the goal were within reach, there would be no difficulty. Without difficulty, there would be no entrepreneurship. Without entrepreneurship, there would be no development or well-being.
The entrepreneur is challenged by difficulty in achieving a goal driven by a purpose. The objectives, problems, and how to confront them are different today than they used to be. The world has changed rapidly, the context is different, and we require new purposes, innovative ventures, and adaptive entrepreneurs. Amid an evolutionary transition from the industrial to the cognitive era, the entrepreneur faces the challenge of learning to undertake in complexity, meaning in a volatile and holistic context. Technological, social, biological, and environmental disruptions follow one another; global feedback leaves no respite and seems dizzying to us.
A fundamental difficulty we face in addressing emerging challenges is that the cognitive capacity of humans required to tackle this new complexity evolves more slowly than the emergence of disruptions. We are prepared for linear progress with incremental steps but not quantum leaps, which in most cases originate from outside our industrial or business realm and sometimes even our territorial scope, as with biological and environmental disruptions.
We are on the brink of making relevant political decisions for the country. However, governments must wait to redesign industrial models quickly. Change mainly comes from citizens, with new consumption dynamics and greater social and environmental awareness, and entrepreneurs, with their innovation and dynamism.
Public policies driven by a government based on specific ideologies or worldviews (<>), which were previously chosen—sometimes more democratically than others—used to define the framework for entrepreneurship. Today, this sequence has been reversed. The emergence in markets of novel forms of entrepreneurship, which respond to new human needs and interests and rely on digital technologies but often escape existing regulatory frameworks and norms—sometimes even hacking them—relegates public policies to chasing the effects generated by these changes. It is the fate of the new times, one that no government of a relatively small country on a global scale can dramatically alter.
Daniel Fernández
Originally published in El Mercurio.
Photo by Kristin Wilson on Unsplash
