In December 2019, a man in Wuhan China began to cough uncontrollably. Given that it’s December and almost flu season, he doesn’t think much of it. But little did he know that his first cough would start a yearlong pandemic that would devastate the lives of almost 7 Billion people across the world. Fast forward a year and we are still mostly confined to our homes and having to adapt to a completely different lifestyle within our homes. Disease or not, life must go on and we’ve adapted a host of new technologies, lifestyle changes, mindset augmentations etc to adapt to the point where it’s bearable. Though bearable, one would be hard pressed however to call this pandemic anything but mostly black in this grey world we live in, but some of the lining have undoubtedly been silver. One such silver lining has been the massive increase in entrepreneurship during the pandemic. With 2020 unemployment rates being at 4.15%, more people are getting to work but the nature of the work has changed. Now a significant portion of jobs are “Work from Home” where a significant portion of employees have to adopt technologies which they otherwise wouldn’t have for a very long time. This also freed up a good amount of their time which was otherwise lost, especially in a city like Dhaka, by things like travel, Traffic, organizational inefficiency etc. However, this has also created the happy coincidence of allowing for a much larger portion of the population to improve the foundational requirements they had to satiate their entrepreneurial spirit.
The economist, Joseph Schumpeter in his 1942 book, “Capitalism, socialism and democracy” coined the term “Creative destruction” which means the breaking down of existing structures and processes to create new ones through innovation and progress. One could make a strong argument that COVID has necessitated exactly this kind of creative destruction in today’s economy to adapt to our new reality. And entrepreneurship is considered the perennial wind for exactly this creative destruction. In particular 5 realities of this shift stand out as far as enabling entrepreneurship is concerned:
- Time
Due to work being shifted online, the vast majority of employees today have more free time; or at the very least, control over their time with versatile work hours. This enables them to spend time on that entrepreneurial dream they’ve had logged in their brain for years now but never had the scope to pursue. This also allows them to save some office hours for later at night while doing business activities during the day, which was otherwise not possible at the office physically.
A further aspect of this is the raw amount of time saved through the mitigation of the traditional inefficiencies of the office environment.
- Travel
An extension of the first point, but for a country like Bangladesh; this requires extra specific mention due to how significant a barrier this has traditionally been. An average Bangladeshi spends 119 hours annually stuck in traffic. That accounts for a monetary loss of over 17,500TK due to traffic alone!
With the advent of the pandemic and work from home culture, commute times and loss due to traffic have decreased drastically to give people stronger foundations to actually get things done.
Furthermore, due to necessity, many people hoping to start entrepreneurial ventures have had to resort to online alternatives the government has made available such as E-trade licenses, E-tins etc. which they may not have otherwise even looked into. This has made people perceive the biggest obstacle in formation of private ventures, the government, feel more manageable and created a more favorable sentiment towards business in general.
- The internet
Probably the single most significant aspect of pandemic lifestyles has been the internet. Everything from work, to friends, to learning, to teaching and everything in between have all seen a dramatic shift towards the internet. This has also opened up the limitless opportunities the internet has to offer to the people. After all, when you spend all day on the internet; you’re bound to learn some of its secrets.
In the early days, the internet was not pitched simply as a product; but rather “The internet revolution”. This was because of the immense potential the internet had to revolutionize every single aspect of our lives. An area of special interest was that of business. With the internet, people now had instant aces to almost limitless information, worldwide markets, suppliers, consumer data, comparisons, mentors etc. Every single aspect of entrepreneurial life was made simpler and more accessible. With the mass exodus from traditional work environments to the virtual world of the internet; these opportunities suddenly beamed in the faces of individuals like a supernova and many people took up on the potential the internet held. This has likely been the single greatest contributor to the entrepreneurial reality of today and the pandemic has hasted it by many years. All for the better of everyone involved.
- Communication
Lastly, with internet communication becoming the norm rather than that one niche activity people do with relatives abroad; it has become much better integrated with the day to day lives of everybody. It is said that the single greatest skill of an entrepreneur is communication and the pandemic has necessitated extensive use and development of this skill. Not only can this, but the quantity of communication entrepreneurs do has exponentially increased as well. People can now coordinate vast amounts of business activities conveniently and effectively, which has given that final boost to the pandemic entrepreneurial mindset of today
Conclusion
In conclusion, the digital Bangladesh of tomorrow will undoubtedly be powered by the digital entrepreneur of today. Though this pandemic has been a challenge to all of us, the reality is that it has shifted the dynamics of day to day life in an amazing way to adapt. It just so happens that that shift progressed us a decade in terms of adoption of technologies. The entrepreneur of today can find customers, make orders, set up sales, and provide customer service from the comfort of their home in their pajamas. And with the pandemic, these digital entrepreneurs are only set to rise.