NaijaTalkTalk- Nature of an Entrepreneur- Olatunji Idowu

Andrew

I consider it a privilege and great opportunity to share my entrepreneurial learning and insights with you. As a community, it is important for us to regularly “bounce off” ideas and share knowledge on how we can constantly create great products and services that add value to the people and society at large – especially now that our continent is being referred as the next frontier.

On this edition, i will like to share with you some characteristics of an entrepreneur and subsequently share insights on design thinking and process of iteration. 

 

We must be clear about one thing, and it is that entrepreneurship is not for the faint hearted – it is about action, getting up and doing. Entrepreneurial journey is tough – it’s about trying, failing and continued persistence until success is achieved. It is ingrained in the nature of an entrepreneur to be relentless and be willing to take risks.

 The mind of an entrepreneur is filled with unquenchable passion and desire to make a change, create value and provide solution to problems.

 Entrepreneurs are constantly generating ideas, gaining insights and developing strategies and mechanism that translate ideas into reality. 

So, the innovative, inventive and disruptive nature of entrepreneurs makes their role critically important to any given society – therefore, the progress and development of any society depend on the entrepreneurial spirit of its people.

 

As an entrepreneur, you can either see the world from positive perspective, that is, you can be passionately hopeful about Nigeria/Africa – to the extent that you envision a better way of educating people or cheapest way of providing conducive and beautifully design housing project, you can have a hunch on how food can be better preserved to avoid wastage, you can find a better way of transforming our environment into a better place to live. 

Your imagination can definitely take you to technological revolutions that evolve infinite intelligence and auto-ailment-corrective devices that creates super human.

 You may not only just see but engrossed in making plans to make your vision absolute reality.

Having a very pessimistic view of the world is equally in the realm of entrepreneurship - your visual image of the future can be dark, bleak and full of uncertainty. It is okay to envision accelerated human greed and inequality of all sorts that will cause tension, create violence and steer up resentment. 

Your perception may be that human activities will create environmental disaster in the future. You can be definite about your assumption and take pro-active measure that will mitigate it. There is no limit to what you can envision as an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurship is about spotting a gap and designing great product or service that perfectly fills the gap. But whatever you think, imagine or envision - is purely an assumption, it will have to be tested and validated before it can be considered a viable value proposition. 

Design thinking and process of iteration can land you a viable value proposition with minimum viable product. I will be sharing some insights on design thinking and iteration on the subsequent editions. Before then, what problem would you like to solve? Just write it down and keep it safe. Thanks for reading.