CAPITALISM FOR SOCIAL GOOD? THE COMPLEXITIES OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP CULTURE Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you would have noticed the recent trend celebrating entrepreneurs and startups. From the infamous Elon Musk, to the establishment of the MQU Incubator, entrepreneurship culture is all around. If the popularity of the Barefoot Investor can tell us anything, it’s that the general public have a burgeoning love for entrepreneurs. When most of us think of entrepreneurs, we probably think of someone like Elon Musk - a creative, somewhat unconventional workaholic with a deep passion for their business idea. Research shows that despite this ‘hero image’ of entrepreneurs, there’s no evidence to indicate that entrepreneurs succeed based on the merit of their personality traits. In fact, a large part of their success is due to following “processes and patterns of developing and testing ideas, building support networks and developing certain communication and business skills”. This is quite a contrast to the depiction of entrepreneurs as savvy saviours of humanity, as seen in the common media depiction of Virgin founder Richard Branson. Converse to the myth of the underdog entrepreneur, in their 2014 research into entrepreneurship, Logue and Boersma found that the majority of entrepreneurs had a solid financial background, a successful career in their own industry and access to a highly developed professional network. While the entrepreneurs in the study were “determined, resilient and passionate” and “open to risk”, the success of their business idea was largely based on their ability to acquire and develop new skills relating to the market. In other words, entrepreneurs aren’t born, but created through particular social and economic circumstances. Even people within the movement point out the difficulty in defining what it means to be an entrepreneur. After the failure of his startup, Eric Ries, a Silicon Valley software engineer, published a book
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in which he argued that the industry was full of “myth-making”. In The Lean Startup, Ries writes: “The grim reality is that most startups fail. Most new products are not successful. Most new ventures do not live up to their potential”. Contrary to the mainstream emphasis on “quirky maverick personalities and entrepreneurial charisma”, Ries argues that entrepreneurship is about management, discipline and acquiring vital business skills. This point is an important step in uncovering the way in which entrepreneurship is depicted in the media. Working for a cause Recently, new kinds of entrepreneurship have emerged. Social entrepreneurship uses commercial processes in solving contemporary issues. Social entrepreneurs therefore start businesses with the intent of producing social good. These are different from Not-for-Profits because social entrepreneurs turn a profit in the process of addressing social problems. In Sydney alone, a number of social entrepreneurship initiatives have sprung up. Digital matching platform Digital Talent is one such example. It was founded by Nirary Dacho, who, after arriving on a humanitarian visa, struggled to find meaningful employment despite his extensive education and experience. The platform assists refugees to find jobs, thereby helping them to circumnavigate the systemic and cultural bias endemic within Australian hiring and work cultures. The trend of refugee entrepreneurship programs is not limited to Australia, with similar initiatives and programs having sprung up in Europe and other parts of the world.
