A very big load of horse manure… and the next entrepreneurial revolution!

author: Dr. Ernesto Sirolli

Futurologists are people who speculate about the future. They have their own magazines, journals and conferences. One such conference was held in New York City in 1880 and the question that the futurologists addressed was the following: “What will New York City look like in 1980?” The consensus was that by year 1980 New York City would not exist anymore. The reason, according to the futurologists, was that to move the ever increasing population of New York in 100 years, 6,000,000 horses would have been needed, and the problems created by the manure would have been impossible to deal with!

The preferred mode of transportation had been, for centuries, the horse and the horse could not meet the requirements of the new cities anymore…it was, like today’s cars, too polluting. Yet the average person could not imagine a future without them and Henry Ford famously said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Instead by 1900 in the USA there were 1001 car manufacturing companies.

Small, tentative, entrepreneurial and private sector the pioneers of automotive transportation started a revolution in response to both the market needs and wants. In fact they started a revolution in advance of market wants.

Who are the entrepreneurs at work today? Where are they? What are they doing? Can we predict their appearance? Can we plan for them to appear when we want them to appear?

We believe that we are confronted by many “horse manure” problems in the world and that the need for original solutions will be addressed, right now, by entrepreneurs that are all but invisible not only to the general public but to many economic development practitioners as well.

What can be done to assist and expedite the work of entrepreneurs in our society? Old methods don’t work. Planning, for instance, is totally inadequate to the task as eloquently put by Peter Drucker who wrote: “Planning as the term is commonly understood is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy. Innovation does indeed need to be purposeful and entrepreneurship has to be managed. But innovation, almost by definition, has to be decentralized, ad hoc, autonomous, specific, and microeconomic. It had better start small tentative, flexible. Indeed, the opportunities for innovation are found, on the whole, only way down and close to events. (…) Innovative opportunities do not come with the tempest but with the rustling of the breeze.”

Facilitating Entrepreneurship

If entrepreneurs cannot be created nor planned what can the economic development professionals do? There are no doubts that the present economic and social crises will bring about a wave of innovations that are going to change, once again, the world we know. At the Sirolli Institute we believe that to be part of the change we have to be prepared to deal with entrepreneurs anywhere they may be, no matter how small, tentative or inexperienced.

Enterprise Facilitation is about capturing the passion, energy and imagination of our own people in our own communities and advocating for generalized entrepreneurship, no matter where it occurs.

It is also, and most importantly, about being prepared to offer, to a new generation of entrepreneurs, the management skills necessary to start AND sustain their ventures.

The economist and philosopher Ernest Schumacher once wrote: “I can't myself raise the winds that might blow us, or this ship, to a better world. But I can at least put up the sail so that, when the wind comes, I can catch it.”

We, economic development professionals, may not start the entrepreneurial revolution ourselves but at least we can prepare for it!

Since 1985 Ernesto Sirolli and the Sirolli Institute have worked with hundreds of communities worldwide to build their capacity to respond to entrepreneurs. We do so by working closely with the existing civic leadership and by training them to deliver this second leg of economic development. The Institute trains local Enterprise Facilitators by either establishing a new position or by re-training existing personnel to carry out the facilitation role.