In the last few years, I have seen a vigorous zeal for the startup movement in Dhaka, and it is now spreading to Chittagong. Bangladeshis are entrepreneurial by nature; the lack of big industries in our past, and the drive to survive, has led to the development of many small, medium, and large enterprises.
I personally don’t see the difference between today’s startups (except being a fancy term) and the old term of “bebsha shuru” (starting a business). Is it the cool San Fran phrase that we are trying to adopt? I say, our endeavour here has passion, but no innovation. Innovation is at the core of successful startups. Innovations make your startup different from that of someone who starts a little shop round the corner.
Maybe that is why, in our startup support community, we bring in speakers from the West or the Far East and ask them to mentor our young Bangladeshis. So is it the San Francisco culture we are embedding into the system of the aspiring entrepreneurs? I find a large mismatch in the whole puzzle of creating an ecosystem. Is there innovation? If so, where? If not, why not?
We have the international mentors who think it is normal to be innovative, as they often don’t measure the quality of education between us. There are successful local businessmen who are too busy to mentor, or not really the kind to do so; after all, the wealth of our richest men were not built on innovative products, but rather a “me too” in the garment industry. Then there is policy, which I think we rant too much about. And last but not the least, there is the financial aspect of investment.
There is a reason I call the current phenomenon “entrepreneurial cannibalism.” I was invited to sit through a number of pitches at startups. I hardly found any new idea or much innovation. “I want to open an online store,” “I want to open a food cart,” “I want to build an app” – as if we don’t have enough of those already.
And most “wow” ideas are copied from other parts of the world, which I personally do not mind if they are executed well. The ideators further expect an investor to invest in these ideas without any market information or proof of their entrepreneurial, technical, or leadership capabilities.
Obviously, we cannot blame them either. What we see is what we yearn for. Millionaires of the nation grew on such pillars of being copycats – you opened a garment factory and everyone else did. You opened a bank and then we had 56 others.
Obviously, the difference between them and the ideator is the current disposable income. While there is a bandwagon of innovators who are building drones and winning global competitions, the ecosystem is unable to nurture them to build products and services that can be taken to the market.
So, don’t we have any innovators? Yes, we do. However, innovation now is seen as a hobby that was like learning to sing or dance. To parents, it does not have career prospects no matter how good you are. Innovators are either forced to join the “real life” workforce with a big salary (where they are underemployed in comparison to their capability), or they are forced to immigrate.
An English daily last year quoted that half of the 12,000 skilled workers who migrate abroad are engineers. We are unable to give them an opportunity. The World Bank’s paper “Innovation Ecosystem in Bangladesh” mentions the lack of academic and technical skills given at universities as one of the major failures for innovations to grow.
We need to look at the education system, where seeds of innovation and exposure to markets take place. Obviously, one might argue that most of the successful entrepreneurs are dropouts, which I would not beg to differ on. The challenge lies in what facilities and exposure we can give to young minds.
We will continue to have such “me too” products until we build a solid base for innovation. Let us go back to the slate and help draw the pillars of innovation and then move to startups. It is an arduous task indeed, but to find the right investments, we need this, and the youth of this nation deserves this.
It will surely be a failure, but at least they will be excellent failures which we can learn from. It is fine with me if we just build an economy on “outsourced” work and cannibalism, but then let’s not call it a “startup” and stick to our age-old SME tag.