Asean Entrepreneurs. Cooking up businesses, why not more women?

MANILA: Dreaming of an unlimited number of new Asean entrepreneurs, they met on 29 November 2012 in Bangkok to discuss "Co-Incubation and the Opportunities for Food and Agriculture Start-Up Businesses after ASEAN Integration in 2015." The meeting was organized by the Thai Business Incubators and Science Parks Association (Thai-BISPA), the Asia-Pacific Business Incubation Network (APIN) and infoDev of the World Bank. My congratulations to Thai-BISPA, APIN, and infoDev. Yes, your meeting was inspired, but your metaphor was not.

Entrepreneurship requires that you be creative. Ladies & gentlemen, the metaphor of incubation puts you in a box. You have to think out of the box. In this case, people incubate eggs, that's all they can do with eggs!

I've always wondered why economists and businessmen love to say "business incubation" when referring to the creative collaboration in starting up a business based on new or improved technology. I googled for "business incubation" OR "business incubator" (note the double quotes and the word OR in between), and I have just gotten 3,000,000+ results. It's not those millions of experts I'm worried about; it's their English, their metaphor. To say the least, "Incubation" is an inappropriate concept because it does not allow you to manipulate; if you insist, either you'll end up breaking the egg, or with an egg on your face!

To avoid such embarrassments, for "incubation," I will now substitute an old-new concept, which is "cooking up," which means "fabricate" or "concoct" in its original, negative sense (American Heritage Dictionary). But I'm always creative, so I will now turn a negative into a positive, using the same phrase in a constructive, collaborative manner:

To cook enough food for a party, you need ingredients, utensils, assistants, advisors, a budget and menu. To cook up a new business, the ingredients are your inputs; the utensils are your devices and tools; your assistants are your co-workers; your advisors are your handholders; your budget is your business plan; and the menu is the idea or technology you want to commercialize.

The theme of the Bangkok conference was "Creating opportunities for agribusiness ventures in emerging markets of the world." Note, "creating opportunities" calls for cooking up things, which emphasizes a multitude of people and processes and products, not incubating eggs, which emphasizes a few people working on only one product.

If I add just one word and rewrite the theme into this, "Entrepreneurship: Creating opportunities for agribusiness ventures in emerging markets of the world," the focus of the conference becomes clearer: How to make more entrepreneurs. The technology may in fact be old but largely ignored, new, or improved; what is called for are more or new entrepreneurs.

In his inaugural address at the Bangkok meeting, ICRISAT Director General William Dar said:

Entrepreneurship plays a critical role in the development and well-being of societies around the world. It creates jobs, drives and shapes innovation, and brings in competition, which in turn improves productivity. An entrepreneurial venture generates employment and income for the local economy, allows for application of new technology, and brings in changes to lifestyles, leading to more value creation across other sectors. Entrepreneurship thus acts as a catalyst supporting the growth of the economy and national competitiveness.

All societies need more entrepreneurs, who drive and shape more innovation that create more jobs, more values to share, thus improving lifestyles, improving the economy, improving national competitiveness. If you needed data to convince you, here's what Dar said: "Formal SMEs contribute up to 45% of employment and up to 33% of the GDP in developing economies." Small and medium enterprises create a tremendous number of jobs; they produce a huge slice of the national pizza pie called the Gross Domestic Product.

The entrepreneurial challenges, the fields for which the world needs to cook up more SMEs are, according to Dar, those that pose "serious threats in the forms of climate change, energy crisis, food crisis, land degradation, loss of biodiversity and population explosion." He emphasized the food needs of the whole world. To innovate, Dar said:

We need to accelerate agricultural growth and the way forward is to create an entrepreneurship climate in the sector. Agriculture and allied sectors should be seen as a business entity, and should veer away from the traditional, subsistence mode of operations.

We need to build and maintain an entrepreneurial climate to meet the need for faster growth in agriculture. It is time that farmers are taught to see farming as a business proposition, not a subsistence operation, not simply a chicken scratching for food. It's time to stop raising farmers as mendicants and start raising them as businessmen who know how to calculate and take risks.

Referring to plant- and animal-based foods, Dar said:

Modernizing the agro-food system can be a strong engine for direct and indirect growth and poverty reduction, while nurturing an ecosystem for innovations in the sector. This will enhance agricultural productivity, raise demand for industrial goods, lower food prices, and curb inflation. It will also encourage broad entrepreneurial activities such as diversification into new products, the growth of rural service sectors, emergence of agro-processing industries, and expansion into new markets.

To modernize the agriculture-based food system in developing countries, Dar must refer to infrastructure that includes roads, bridges, transport systems, processing & storage facilities, marketplaces, even export facilities. These will increase productivity, increase demands, decrease food prices, and check inflation. All that will encourage the growth of entrepreneurship in new products, services, processes, and markets.

ICRISAT & Partners have adopted what they call the Inclusive Market-Oriented Development (IMOD) approach to help the poor farmers raise themselves out of the mire of poverty. With IMOD, Dar said, "We believe … we will be able to stimulate agro-enterprises to raise rural incomes and to create opportunities beyond agriculture." IMOD connects the poor farmer to the rich market. Dar said, "We must remember that effective access to markets provides surplus cash to enable the poor to break out of the poverty-hunger trap."

As a reminder, "Entrepreneurship," Dar said, "always has risks associated with it. The risks are even higher in agriculture-based ventures, given the variables at play in the sector." That is where business cookups in food and agriculture play crucial roles as they provide nurturing environments not only for survival but more so for growth. Through business cookups, people can improve their lives and the lives of their customers. Through business cookups, with much handholding, the poor can help themselves rise from poverty.

For Asean models of farmers as entrepreneurs, for transforming technologies into businesses, thinking global but acting local, I propose a unique, radical approach: Turning cooperatives into inclusive market-oriented entrepreneurs. This is along the inclusive market-oriented development approach of ICRISAT & Partners. Coops are ideal in this regard, as they are democratically managed and owned by the members themselves. With enough public and private business support and assistances, and with its own resources, a coop can very well cook up any number of enterprises for the members, from supplying farm inputs, to harvesting, to marketing; it can invest and hire the staff, take care of the business plan, marketing strategy etc. With the coop as the entrepreneur, undoubtedly  and ultimately, entrepreneurship is democracy in action: 

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

Since the female has been proven to be the smarter of the species when it comes to money management, why don't the Asean countries encourage coops to make more women than men as entrepreneurs? (See image.) And while I'm at it, it's time Muhammad Yunus' microcredit Grameen itself think out of the box and encourage the microcredit females to turn each of their groups of 5 into small, single entrepreneurships, the better to increase efficiency and multiply benefits.

Here's to the women entrepreneurs: May their tribe increase!