So, I read an article recently which stated that youth in South Africa fail to flood the market with new ideas. Instead they resort to running typical i.e. low-risk business.:

Thulani Timile, a consultant who runs SA Business Development and Management Consultancy, said the challenge facing young entrepreneurs was coming up with “out of the box” business ideas.

He postulated that youth were undereducated— thus resulting in their failure to successfully analyze new business opportunities. They also failed to successfully analyze their future ventures which resulted in a dearth of new ideas and a reliance on proven models.

I disagree, in part. I’m sure he is statistically right. However, I think we need to give the youth more credit. They are coming up with new ideas— many are having problems securing funds. More are just unaware of the possibilities. We created Global Entrepreneurship Week to show that he is wrong that youth are crawling with ideas but they need to know its okay to unleash them.

We may be Millenials and we may have a different work ethic/dress code/means of communicating but we are more than anything else creative, idea filled people. Here at Global EW, I come to work every day to celebrate the spirit of creativity, innovation and idealism that pervades our youth. Maybe the problem isn’t with the ideas of the youth but with those people who are adverse to funding and accepting their new ideas. Let’s stop blaming the kids and start looking at the system. What do you think?

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 10:01 am and is filed under Innovators, Organizing The Week. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.