Today, I want to talk about the impact of technology in entrepreneurship. To me, Entrepreneurship is the most intimate form of work a person does. When you are working for someone else, how so much ever the attachment is, there will always be that feeling of alienness to the company.
This is because as an individual you are part of a giant mechanism and the concept of success still is defined on two parameters – Your success and company’s success. And these two tires can run at a different pace. It might be the case that you are going nowhere, learning nothing while the company might be the fastest growing company of the decade. It can also be the case that you might be climbing rungs of stairs while the company might just drop dead.
Entrepreneurship doesn’t work that way.
You are the heart of the situation, you its owner. If it is working well, you are working well, if bad you are in a fix. The fate of the two is sealed together. Of course, you can stop whenever it is spiraling downwards but if you ask any entrepreneur, he will tell you that the biggest decision in life was to part with his baby – whether because it was going well and bought by another company or he had to shut the venture down.
India is not a very friendly place for starting a company. It ranks very low and not just that, the ground realities are even worse. Despite that, India has many entrepreneurs. I believe it is in our blood. The feeling of being owners is strong in us, thus the dream of owning a house or owning a business. Amidst all this enters Technology!
I want to discuss two aspects. Hence, this post will be in two separate parts.
- The impact of technology in entrepreneurship.
- The decrease in the entry barrier of starting a new business.
Impact of Technology in Entrepreneurship
Let’s assume that you want to start a company. The first few steps (after the idea is conceived and is now well built in your mind) are registering the company and going through a few of government formalities. Now, lately, government is trying to ease out the process and a lot of steps have been simplified by online registering and things like that. It is a boon to people who are just starting and are internet friendly.
Add to that the use of Printers, scanners, fax machines and creating copies of any document is not a matter of hours or requires manpower. It is a one man job. Yes, I am comparing it to the old days when there was no printer at all. Even if we do not go that far, the technology is superior enough to old time’s dot-matrix printers (they are still used mind you).
Now, if we add Microsoft Office to the mix and we realise that making presentations or creating documents are far simpler now. I can’t even make a layman realise the importance of Microsoft excel to a company. In fact, the impact of Microsoft Office on productivity needs a completely new article.
Mobile phones have made the work of an entrepreneur much easier. Making appointments with clients or investors, reaching out to people becomes so easy when you have a device in hand that need nothing but signals. Internet, emails and now VoIP are becoming a companies’ card to save money and making life easier. Using a technology like Skype makes an entrepreneur sitting in Delhi capable of talking to an investor in a Mumbai on the same day without splurging on flights or fighting for train tickets.
I am not saying there is no more hard work left in the job. Entrepreneurship starts with hard work and sweating out. What technology has done is ensure that a person is not sweating out on the redundant things. After all, no one wants to see his whole business become a joke because of an error in the balance sheet. In excel it can be corrected in a few minutes. Try doing that on a notebook. For that matter, try finding an error in a notebook.
We can see lot of small business companies running in two tier cities too these days.