The Future of Innovation and Entrepreneurship as Drivers of Livelihoods in Southern Africa: A Synthesis

The Future of Innovation and Entrepreneurship as Drivers of Livelihoods in Southern Africa: A Synthesis

Robert Ebo Hinson

The quality of lives humans will live in the future depends on the rigour of the training experts provide today’s future entrepreneurs to identify societal challenges and innovatively design solutions to address these challenges to create jobs, reduce poverty and contribute to economic development. Though findings from previous scholars show that teaching entrepreneurship from causation logic perspective (which mainly focuses on planning, control, and rational analysis to get to a predefined outcome) does not encourage creativity and innovative thinking and discourages most students from starting a business venture, most institutions and entrepreneurship educators still follow the causation logic. Since entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education are context-specific and context-informed, we argue that teaching entrepreneurship with a focus on contextual innovation as well as technological innovation will better prepare future entrepreneurs to take up the challenge of creating meaningful ventures to solve societal problems, create jobs, and alleviate poverty. This position coheres with the effectuation logic which suggest that entrepreneurs need to rely on combinatorial resources that are readily available at hand and co-create opportunities rather than predefining goals in highly uncertain environments. As entrepreneurship is an inexorably complex process that lacks linearity, entrepreneurship education should target the entrepreneurial and venture founding processes that entrepreneurs go through to create successful ventures, which follow the effectuation logic rather than teaching about the various aspects of the business.

Thus, utilising design thinking and a methodical approach, that focuses on the entrepreneurial process, highlighting the role of innovative skills and creative mindsets will enable entrepreneurship educators to be student-centred and produce entrepreneurs that are prepared for the future rather than merely educating students “about” the various aspect of a business such as marketing, human resources and accounting. We build on this argument by showcasing exemplars of how innovation exploits and technological affordances are being exploited to demonstrate how the application of entrepreneurship education is materialising in ways that generate value creating and value enhancing ventures at the bottom of the pyramid in resource constrained emerging economies in Southern Africa.

Palgrave Studies in Technology and Innovation in Africa

2024

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-55935-8_8