One who undertakes an endeavour

Posted on February 27, 2010 at 11:35 PM

There is a lot of talk at the moment about the need for entrepreneurship to help get our economy growing again.  I’ve just learned tonight from Wikipedia that entrepreneur is a French word that means “one who undertakes an endeavour”.  I think this means we all are entrepreneurs in our own way.  But that’s not the notion of an entrepreneur that is put across by many of those that call for the encouragement of entrepreneurship in Irish Society. I always get the impression that what is being called for are people who will start up a business to make money and as a result create jobs.  There was a young man that seemed to be presented in this mould on the Pat Kenny show last week. He had made a million from setting up an I.T. company.  The idea being put forward by the programme, I felt, was that this is the type of entrepreneur that should populate our economy and even our parliament.  If the young man came up with some scientific or technological innovation that changed people’s lives, that achievement was not highlighted by Pat Kenny, or the young man himself.  I do not know what the young man’s company created and I don’t want to judge him as such. Michael D. Higgins T.D. pointed out at an Oireachtas Committee during the week that ‘Frontline’ doesn’t allow for much more than black and white positions to be set out by the panellists and audience.  But I felt the idea that was being put forward by the way he was introduced, and even in the way the young man spoke of himself,  was that what we mean by entrepreneurs is people that make money and create jobs, and that is about the height of it.   Kenny spoke about there not being enough business people in the Dail.

I spoke about this view of entrepreneurship this Wednesday in the Dail during the Fine Gael Private Members Motion on the need for Job Creation this week. I argued that our entrepreneurship should not be just about business people that make a quick buck.  Many entrepreneurs in recent years that were lauded in the media in Ireland made a quick buck and just as quickly went bankrupt when the bubble burst. I gave the hypothetical example of a PR company being established and within a couple of years being sold for a few million. How there was something of the bubble about that.  In fact my example is more than hypothetical.  I based it on an example or two I am aware of but obviously I am not going to name the companies concerned.

In one of my earlier blog posts ‘And the winner of the Nobel Prize is --- a graduate of a tech’ I wrote about how Professor Charles Kao, last year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics and a graduate of Woolwich Polytechnic, had invented the use of fibre optic cables to communicate information.  So I used this example in my speech of how someone, who graduated from the equivalent of our Institutes of Technology, had invented something that changed our lives for the better and changed how we communicate with one another. That was what our entrepreneurship should be based on.  We should invest in educating graduates in science, engineering, the arts and the humanities and so on.  And all of these graduates should be involved in entrepreneurship and not just business people. Entrepreneurship should involve the public as well as the private sector.  Public Agencies in Ireland had a good record in enterprise including Bord Na Mona. Our vision should involve the public and private sectors creating sustainable jobs that are not simply based on making a quick buck but based on a knowledge economy.  It should be about making something substantial, concrete and sustainable that will improve our lives.

Just had a look at the information about ‘Your country Your Call’ at www.yourcountryyourcall.com and think that at least in its categories it has the right idea about what is meant when it is said we need new ideas for the economy and job creation. But welcome though this initiative is, it is just one competition and two awards.  We must prioritise investment in our education because that investment will help in all of our endeavours.

The video clip below is of my speech if you wish to play it back.

¹The Irish Times 25th February 2010 'Kenny's 'Frontline' degrades politics says Higgins'

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