One of my favourite topics is the role that entrepreneurs can play in Nigeria.
So how do you define entrepreneurs? In the wider sense, they could be anyone who is planning or have started a business, but that is a very wide and inaccurate definition. Entrepreneurs have to be those willing to take not only the risk of starting their own businesses, but willing to be innovative in their approach. Innovation may not be technologically oriented, but it’s about changes to processes or the way we do things. Sometimes, it is about the application of knowledge from another field to a new one or even the introduction of new processes to a new environment.
So Nigeria needs a lot of those people ready and willing to work together and bring benefits to the majority of the people. Can you imagine the impact of many of the organisations such as Apple, Microsoft, Dell, etc on the U.S. Economy, now imagine Germany without the economic power house like BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen etc. Nigeria needs entrepreneurs who can setup and run new companies like these ones to become a great nation.
There are opportunities in transportation, housing, food production, manufacturing, tourism. Talking about tourism, this is a another topic on its own. So many things that we can do in order to make Nigeria a tourist friendly nation. There are opportunities everywhere. We need people with the foresight to make these things happen.