The latest edition of The Economist has a lot of great articles, but one with the very odd title of Suck it and See (subscription required) caught my eye when I opened my print edition because it demonstrated the essence of what it means to be an entrepreneur. James Dyson was an art student with an idea and a penchant for taking apart vacuum cleaners. He believed he could make vacuum cleaners work more effectively, so he built thousands of prototypes to perfect his design. Then he sought manufacturers who would make it under license. He was turned down over and over, both in his home country of Britain as well as in other countries, until the Japanese recognized the potential. His Dyson “G-force” cleaner was a hit, and eventually he established manufacturing operations in Britain.
All of this ingenuity, initiative, investment, self-confidence, risk-taking, and willingness to repeatedly fail in order to ultimately succeed is part of what underlies the word “entrepreneur” for English speakers (ok, and French ones, too, given the word’s origin there). Problem is, in many languages, there is no equivalent word that captures these aspects. Arabic, for example, can convey business, merchant, etc., in a word, but it takes a lengthy explanation to capture ‘entrepreneur’. After the recent success in working with Ministries and linguistic experts to invent an Arabic word for “corporate governance”, which also did not exist until the recently approved “hawkamat ash-sharikat”, CIPE and its Egyptian partners are now raising the issue of creating Arabic terminology that captures the breadth of meaning in entrepreneurship. This is really a process of concept formation. It can be lengthy and seem esoteric, but it is essential to moving forward on these issues — if there is no common word or language for a topic, then the concept itself does not adequately exist in society.
Anyway, there’s much more to the Dyson story, but that moves us from “entrepreneurship” to “globalization” — a topic for another day.
Published Date: February 05, 2007