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Yesterday’s BusinessMirror carried an article about
three new graduates (from UP Diliman) whose business
plan to increase “dental tourism” to the Philippines won
top honors in Hong Kong.
“Joyce
Anne Cruz, Reynaline Tugade and Christina Limbo bagged
the Best Presentation Award, one of the two most coveted
plums given by HSBC for its annual Young Entrepreneur
Regional Awards held at the bank’s headquarters.”
I, too,
congratulate these budding entrepreneurs. However, I am
wondering if we are reaching too far in this idea of
entrepreneurship.
I have
had the honor of judging some of the recent contests for
business plans to encourage this Filipino
entrepreneurial spirit. It is sometimes amazing to see
what some bright college kids can do with a little time
and a PowerPoint program. The ideas flow like water and
some are quite interesting, if not practical. You almost
wish you could give them all a bag of money to develop
their ideas just to see what would happen next. Except
we know what will happen next.
At least
90 percent of these great corporate “inventions” would
pass into the pages of business history a year or two
down the road, regardless of the funds invested.
The
women, Cruz, Tugade and Limbo, devoted much time, effort
and dedication to their noble goal of (quoting from the
article of Ms. Honey Madrilejos-Reyes) “concentrating on
dental tourism because we believe the country can
capitalize on our skilled dental doctors and experts. We
want the Philippines to have that mark in Asia and
eventually the world. It was an advocacy on our part to
do something for our country. We also want to show the
competence of the Filipino dentists. With Mabuhay
Smiles, our dentists do not have to leave the
Philippines
for a job overseas.”
Mr. Jose
Ma. Concepcion III created a great organization,
Philippine Center for Entrepreneurship, to promote and
help young entrepreneurs. Again, a noble idea to help
nurture the creativity of the youth. The problem that I
have with these schemes is that they follow the same
mindset as “technocrats.”
The
original definition of “technocrat,” coined in 1919, had
nothing to do with technology. It is, in fact, referring
to people with certain skills making decisions based on
their expertise. It was somewhat utopian that the
economy be regulated by economists, social policy
decided by political scientists, the health-care system
run by medical professionals and so on.
The new
variation of the term is that anybody can have a great
idea and that all it takes is a little help from the two
things every entrepreneur needs: mentoring and money.
Most of
these entrepreneurial types look to the Silicon Valley,
where with just mentoring and money, the computer age
was born. It looks nice on paper, except it isn’t
necessarily true.
Bill
Gates copied his Windows from Apple inventors Jobs,
Wozniak and Wayne. Further, do you remember any of these
names: Sinclair, Tandy or Kooro Manufacturing and
Electronics Cooperative of Skopje, Macedonia? They were
all the true entrepreneurial originators of the personal
computer. In fact, Kooro mass-produced the first PC in
1976, all units of which were sold to the national
government of Yugoslavia.
The
point is that the idea of creativity as embodied in much
of the new “entrepreneurship” is about reinventing the
wheel.
Sometimes it is more practical to simply look at every
need that already has a viable sympathetic market and
exploit the situation.
The
government wants to venture with a greater focus into
“education tourism.” Recently, the government and
China’s education ministry signed an agreement to make
it easier for them to come here to study.
It is
highly unlikely that any of our local young capitalists
would view this as very exciting, warranting any effort.
Then I read this from the California Sacramento Bee
newspaper: “Even though there’s been a significant
increase in training programs in recent years, the state
[California] has an estimated 17,000 qualified nursing
applicants on schools’ waiting lists. The University of
California forecast a demand for registered nurses in
2014 that’s 40,000 higher than the current forecast of
supply.”
There
are many people who want to learn nursing, but they
cannot get into nursing school.
We have
thousands of nursing schools in the Philippines. A
practical entrepreneurial business plan ought to focus
on what ONE nursing school would need to do to fully
meet
California
educational requirements for nursing. Then figure out a
way to contact each of those 17,000 applicants who can’t
get into a school in
California.
I will concede that it is not as catchy an idea as some
others, but it would probably make money.
We hold
the Jollibees, the Microsofts and all the other
achievements of the entrepreneurs as some sort of a
standard. They are not. These, as others like them, are
the exceptions. One successful person I know makes
toilet tissue. Plain, standard, common toilet tissue. He
just does it better than everyone else.
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