Development of Entrepreneurial Skills Web in Indigenous Context

Abstract

Entrepreneurship has gained interest in previous few decades and it is considered as an important factor in economic growth of the country (Wong, Ho & Autio, 2005). Prevalent economic, social and political conditions have increased necessity of flourishing entrepreneurial culture (Amin and Tomaney, 1991; Thomas, 2000). The government has been taking many initiatives for this purpose, including most recent youth loan scheme (Abbasi, 2014). However, success ratio of such schemes remained low (Mian, 2014). One major reason of failure of these initiatives was lack of skills as identified by informal conversations. This lead to identify set of skills that can be useful in launching business successfully at very initial stages. Establishing a set of skills will not only help in establishing a criterion for considering young entrants for youth schemes who possess a certain level of these skills. Establishment of set of skills will also help to provide evaluation criteria for students graduating from business schools thus helping to find level of skills in them and to work in areas that need improvement. This will ultimately help curriculum developers to integrate these skills in curriculum. The policy makers will be able to use this set of skills as criteria for pre-policy measure while working on flourishing entrepreneurial niche.

The entrepreneurial skills are affected by many factors, including environment, geography, social and cultural values (Blume & Covin, 2011) education and training. Other example include a study carried out by Ahmad (2007) on cross cultural study on entrepreneurial competencies among Australian and Malaysian businessmen, reports that entrepreneurial competencies are context-specific and change with the changing business environment and cultural orientation. Similar results have been reported by Phillips (2008), Chaston (2009) Ahmad, Ramayah, Wilson, and Kummerow (2010). More studies has been carried out to identify effect of culture on entrepreneurial skills examples include work presented by Busenitz, Gómez, & Spencer, 2000; Lee & Peterson, (2000), Mueller & Thomas, (2001) and Noorderhaven, et al (2004). This lead to rationale of the study emphasizing to identify set of entrepreneurial skills that is more appropriate in local settings.

Keywords: entrepreneurial skills and sub-skills are different in local context

JEL Classification: H1