By Bonnie James
American inventor and entrepreneur Dr S Thomas Emerson, presently based in Qatar, is authoring a book on a comparative study of entrepreneurial effectiveness in various countries and cultures.
“What I hope to glean is which countries are the most effective entrepreneurially and how they have done it,” the associate teaching professor of Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar told Gulf Times.
Dr Emerson, one of the creators of the widely used Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology, is the David T and Lindsay J Morganthaler Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh.
Presently, he is on a three-year assignment at Carnegie Mellon Qatar, delivering courses on entrepreneurship to scientists and engineers, as well as a more advanced course on topics in entrepreneurship.
“Why, for example, is Singapore entrepreneurially successful? Is it because of their educational infrastructure, policies of the government, or the cultural effects in the population which is largely ethnic Chinese?” Dr Emerson asked.
The same questions should be asked about Silicon Valley - why is it so rich in entrepreneurs? It has been said that every Starbucks in the region is an incubator for ideas, he said.
“So it is that kind of culture that we need to import here and I think the first thing we have to do is to understand what distinguishes one region entrepreneurially from another, what lessons can be learnt from them and then how we can adapt those lessons and that learning to fit the regional needs and create the regional future,” he explained.
Dr Emerson, a recognised expert in computer-generated speech and computerised call processing technologies and holder of five US patents and a number of foreign patents, said entrepreneurship certainly has a function of wealth creation. But it also has a function of change. It essentially drives positive change into societies.
“If you look at the world as we see it today, we wonder how we ever got along without e-mail, cell phones, or the Internet, and all of those things are products of just a brief span of human history and were brought about by entrepreneurs driving and exploiting that change,” he said.
Entrepreneurship is a mindset, according to Dr Emerson. It is a form of behaviour. All are driven by certain things that form part of their personality and their world view.
In a large number of people, caution is part of the equation. For entrepreneurs opportunity is the focus. It is not that they are wild eyed risk takers; they are not. The best entrepreneurs try to minimise the risk that they take.
“But the best entrepreneurs also focus on opportunity above risk, and they are willing to take risk provided the opportunity is sufficiently attractive. In a way entrepreneurs are the people who invent the future,” he said.
Dr Emerson said that Peter Drucker, considered the creator and inventor of modern management and the greatest management thinker of the last century, famously remarked that the best way to predict the future is to invent it.
“Well, entrepreneurs are the ones who can do that,” he quipped.
Dr Emerson thinks that his study would provide some direction for policy for governments.
“Clearly governments want to encourage entrepreneurial wealth creation, but they don’t always know how to do it, and what the best policies are that will lead to the most successful entrepreneurs in a society,” he said.
“I want to see if I can help gain that knowledge and disseminate it,” Dr Emerson added. |
