A national conference on “Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Developing Economies” was held at King’s College, Kathmandu. Entrepreneurship has been one of the cornerstones of policymakers to promote employment and economic growth. To that end, the rate, as well as the quality of entrepreneurship, become important. Since the quality of entrepreneurial ecosystems often determines the rate and quality of entrepreneurship, researchers and policymakers have shown significant interest in the antecedents and consequences of entrepreneurial ecosystems. In developing markets such as Nepal, entrepreneurial ecosystems are less developed since not all the elements of the ecosystem are well-developed and/or functional. For instance, they often lag behind in terms of elements such as formal institutions, infrastructure, technology, intermediaries, human capital, financial capital, etc. In this context, facilitating the emergence of thriving entrepreneurial ecosystems in developing markets could be even more challenging.
Hence, a national conference titled “Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Developing Economies” was held at King’s College, Kathmandu. This conference was organized in order to bring together various stakeholders who are the key players in the entrepreneurial ecosystem of Nepal in one single platform. The conference also invited research papers that shed light on various facets of entrepreneurial ecosystems, particularly in developing markets. The themes of this conference were startups in “Developing Markets: Strategy and Performance, Role of the State in Entrepreneurial Ecosystems, Digital Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Developing Economies”.
Proceedings: Welcome Note
In the opening session, Anant Tamang, senior researcher at the Center for Research and Development (CERAD) at King’s College welcomed the guests and presenters and highlighted the need to organize a conference to create a dialogue to discuss entrepreneurship promotion, development, and facilitation considering the importance of entrepreneurship in developing economies like ours.
Keynote Presentation:
Drs. Ing. Wilco Braam talked about the community of technology and unleashing the power to educate. Firstly, he shared his views on social capital, human capital, and economic capital. He talked about the innovation arena which describes four important elements which were technology, organization, market, and application. He believes that a community of practice could help in learning and interacting in a better way while solving different problems together. He also shared some factors and activities that can be done to achieve the community of practice through the process of sharing, solving, committing, and making works visible. He showed a huge connection between information and communication technologies.
He believes that thinking at both the organizational level and the individual level helps achieve things in better ways. Seven design principles of Wenger conclude that there can be important learnings and useful insights from the community of practice. He also shared about the design for evolution, ways of opening a dialogue between inside and outside perspectives, the importance of knowing the trends, the importance of inviting various levels of participation, the need of developing both public and private community spaces, and the importance of focusing on values. He explains technology subdomains and the relation of technology with the community of practice in his last part.
Presentation 1 – Entrepreneurial Ecosystem and Its Influence on Entrepreneurial Intention: A Study on Student Entrepreneurs
Bikram Prajapati, vice-Principal of King’s College, shared that entrepreneurship has been a tea-talk nowadays. His study was done on the entrepreneurship ecosystem and its influence on entrepreneurial intention among management students. He started off with briefly defining entrepreneurship and its development followed by sharing different problems that have affected an entrepreneurial culture. His study was to identify the intentions of students towards opening new businesses and engaging in entrepreneurial ventures.
He talked about different avenues such as governmental support, access to finance, social-cultural support, physical infrastructure support, access to information, education and training support, entrepreneurial capabilities, and internationalization needed in building the entrepreneurial venture. These were the main factors that can affect the intentions of students towards entrepreneurship. MBA students’ entrepreneurial intentions as a sample were analyzed to understand the intent and growth factor in their entrepreneurship journey’s success. Through descriptive analysis, he found different important roles that should be done in all those areas discussed above.
Presentation 2 – Understanding Returnee Entrepreneurship in Nepal: Opportunities, Challenges, and Contribution
Returnee entrepreneurs are people who go outside the country for education and then come back and start a new venture. Literature on returnee entrepreneurs focus mainly on emerging nations such as China and India because they have made the most impact. For instance, the IT industry is propagated by these groups of entrepreneurs. Sagar Jung Karki, a student from British College presented his research on understanding returnee entrepreneurship in Nepal by analyzing different aspects such as opportunities, challenges, and contributions. Firstly, he gave a short introduction on returnee entrepreneurs who are people who start their business ventures in their home country after gaining education and experiences abroad. He found this topic interesting and relevant in the case of Nepal.
Therefore, in this context, the main objective of his study was to find the reasons for entrepreneurs returning to their home country and to evaluate their characteristics, to explore challenges and opportunities, to examine the contributions made by them, and also to suggest the relevant stakeholders for making a better environment for returnee entrepreneurs. From different research design methods, he found different perceptions of returnee entrepreneurs, great opportunities for globalization through practices and new technologies, and even challenges they face because of bureaucracy and human resources inadequacy. He believes that there should be changes in unnecessary rules and regulations and believes in improving bureaucracy and promoting a favorable entrepreneurial environment. He recommended that there should be both quantitative and qualitative research done to find better success factors, knowledge use, social ties, firm performance, the effect of institutional or social environment, and thus more sector-wise research.
Presentation 3 – Analysis of Adoption Challenges for Mobile Banking in Nepal
Pratikshya Bhandari, a student from King’s College analyzed the adoption challenges for mobile banking in the case of Nepal and shared different aspects related to it. She did her research on 200 participants within 3 months wherein the participants were chosen from within and outside the Kathmandu valley. She analyzed mobile banking adoption choices under socio-economic factors such as urban/rural area, age group, gender, ethnicity, employment, and educational qualification. Through this research, she found that most people do not use mobile banking because they find it difficult to use, feel insecure due to security issues, it is costly as internet services are expensive, and takes more time. She believes that mobile banking can foster if we can properly communicate about data privacy, target rural areas, and teach the way of using it.
Presentation 4 – Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Frameworks
Business ecosystem condenses out of the original swirl of capital, customer interest, and talent generated by innovation, just as successful species spring from the natural resources of sunlight, water, and soil nutrient. According to Moore (1993), there needs to be three ingredients such as capital, customer interest, and talent generated to make an entrepreneurial ecosystem. For thriving ecosystems, there need to be different ingredients. To enable productive entrepreneurship there has to be coordination between a set of interdependent actors and factors. Sujit Pandey posted, if we ask the policy maker what is the current need of Nepal, the answer is economic growth. He talked about the typology of entrepreneurial ecosystems. There are different types of typology but more easy and understandable typologies are embryonic ecosystems and scale-up ecosystems. Embryonic ecosystems have a limited number of startups, limited interactions within the start-up ecosystem, economic activities mostly dependent on large companies, a low entrepreneurial ecosystem among the organizations & people, and limited numbers of dealmakers. In the context of Nepal, the Dolma Impact Fund is the dealmaker. Scale-up is the opposite of an embryonic ecosystem where high numbers of growth-oriented start-ups, strong levels of interactions, and unicorns dominate.
Sujit Pandey asserted that Nepal needs economic growth, and for that the country needs productive entrepreneurship. Therefore, for productive entrepreneurship to foster, a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem is needed. There are two types of processes in the entrepreneurial ecosystem: resource endowments and institutional arrangements. Thriving ecosystems are determined by the resource endowments such as physical infrastructure, demand, inter-me diaries, knowledge, talent, leadership, and finance. He also indicated that resource endowments are also affected by institutional arrangements such as formal institutions (rules and regulations, policy for all things, views from political parties), culture (how entrepreneurial is our culture), and networks (entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs’ connection and relationship, and connection and relationship of fund to the CSO, government). He closed his presentation stating that the above factors determine whether the ecosystem is strong or not.
Presentation 5 – Reimagining Thesis for Entrepreneurial Education
DoLAB is a pre-incubator at King’s College established in 2018 that has been working on developing and facilitating the process of entrepreneurial innovation. The department ran two experimental programs in June-July and November-December 2022 for MBA students in their final semester. The purpose of these programs was to explore the possibility of offering these programs as an alternative to thesis papers for MBA students at King’s.
The concept presentation started with a crash-course demonstration of the process that the students went through in the 2-month programs. The presenters – Raunak Chaudhari and Suzzeet Shrestha – noted how students that were interested in or inclined toward starting ventures or innovating within their organizations benefited from the programs. They also made a note of their realizations as facilitators of the programs that their focus had shifted from helping students work on ideas towards helping students become capable innovators. A model outlining DoLAB’s practices was also shared during the presentation.
The presenters highlighted two areas of research they were interested in pursuing in future iterations of the program. The first area of research is centered around how effective the DoLAB 2-month programs are in developing 21st-century skills and innovative skills. The second area of research deals with the perspective of DoLAB as a part of the incubation and innovation ecosystem at King’s College and focuses on the extent to which the ideas that are developed by students in DoLAB programs actually go to practice beyond the program space.
Key Highlights of the conference:
1. The intentions of students towards the entrepreneurship ecosystem are affected by different factors such as governmental support, socio-cultural support, physical infrastructure support, access to information, education, and training support.
2. Returnee entrepreneurs’ perceptions of challenges and opportunities were different from domestic entrepreneurs due to education and exposure.
3. Even though technology in Nepal is growing faster, many people do not use mobile banking for transactions because they found it difficult to use, feel insecure, take more time, and are costly in using internet services.
4. The entrepreneurial ecosystem is the basic foundation of the economic growth of the nation, resource endowments, and formal institutions determine thriving ecosystems.
Closing Remarks:
As a closing remark, Prakriti Joshi thanked presenters for sharing their experiences, findings, and outcomes. She explained the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Nepal is at an embryonic stage and that in order to develop a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem, efforts from many different stakeholders is necessary. She also stated that this conference was a small effort to understand the need for entrepreneurial ecosystems in developing economies like Nepal.
At last, she expressed her gratitude towards the presenters and appreciated their time and efforts. She also expressed her special thanks to Wilco Nanno Braam for sharing his insights and expertise.
At last, Jeewan Dulal concluded his remarks by thanking the audience for attending the conference. He also mentioned the international conference on this topic with the same themes happening in November 2023.
