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Dr Charles Dehwa
The world over, the role of patriotism in starting, operating and growing businesses (ie, patriotic entrepreneurship) is largely overlooked in entrepreneurship discussions within academia, private and public sectors.

What is excessively spoken about are entrepreneurial tenets such as risk-taking, alertness, creativity, innovation, value addition, commercialisation, persistence, hardworking and profit seeking amongst others.

There is a strong misperception that “patriotism” should be restricted to politics; hence, when patriotism is spoken about, it is usual to hear some within the business fraternity say “don’t mix business with politics”. Yet business and politics are inseparable, anyway, this is a subject for another day.

Given this trajectory, it is high time that we as Zimbabwean entrepreneurs take stock of our patriotic entrepreneurship and envisage how this impacts positively or negatively in achieving our national strategic vision — Zimbabwe a middle income by the year 2030. Before unpacking patriotic entrepreneurship, let us firstly explain some key terms: Entrepreneurship and Intrapreneurship.

The term entrepreneurship is commonly defined as a process of being creative and innovative in starting and growing new businesses profitably, competitively and sustainably.

Apart from being closely associated with new business start-up and growth, entrepreneurship is also predominantly associated with micro, small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

Because entrepreneurship inevitably involves creativity and innovation, its’ very close association with SMEs implies that significant innovation and creativity occurs amongst SMEs. Notably, entrepreneurship is more synonymous with SMEs and in general, they tend to be more creative than large enterprises.

Several factors make SMEs more creative and innovative and these include having limited financial and material resources, having more informal communication, being less bureaucratic, flexible organisational structures and decision making largely reposed in a single person: the owner, manager.

These factors tell a single story, that is, because SMEs have to compete in the market with constrained capabilities, to survive and prosper, they incline themselves to be more agile, creative and innovative by setting up less bureaucratic structures and increasing more informal communication.

Further, the owner, manager, who is usually the chief executive officer and sole decision maker is mostly involved with entire business operations and as such is readily available to pass a decision on spot. There is more on the job learning in SMEs which therefore, promotes significant trial and error thereby ultimately buttressing creativity and innovation.

The above sharply contrasts with the more formal and bureaucratic communication and structures in large enterprises, which to make matters worse, usually have various centres of power and decision making, for example, various senior managers and divisional heads or directors.

Business processes are mostly formalised with rigorous internal controls and with little if not no room for learning on the job. Unless occurring under specifically approved projects, such as new product development test runs, trial and error are very much limited and mistakes are significantly punished.

Further, with the exception of large enterprises, which are learning organisations, the tradition in most large enterprises is that employees do not fully tape into their creativity and innovation and all they predominantly do is routinely discharge their duties in conformity with their stated job descriptions.

However, management, especially senior executives have the latitude to exercise their creativity and innovation and direct subordinates accordingly.

Nevertheless, although large enterprises are less synonymous with entrepreneurship, they still are creative and innovative.

This is because being creative and innovative is not a monopoly of SMEs.

Even though employees in large enterprises might find it challenging to be fully creative and innovative given constraints of their rigid and formalist job descriptions, they still can be creative and innovative whenever they are afforded the opportunity to do so, for example, when put into teams to solve identified business problems.

Annual strategic planning workshops also provide a golden opportunity to employees to demonstrate their creativity and innovation as they usually suggest novel ideas during such workshops.

Consequently, it is a fact that large enterprises are known to draw on the creativity of their managerial and non-managerial employees, senior executive and non-executives to drive creativity and innovation leading to novel business processes.

All this is referred to as intrapreneurship, that is, risk taking to competitively and sustainably exercise creativity and innovation within an existing business, whereas for entrepreneurship such creativity and innovation is directed towards starting and growing a new business.

However, in general, the private and public sectors rarely talk about the term intrapreneurship preferring to use entrepreneurship as a term with a broad meaning that incorporates intrapreneurship. Therefore, in this article, entrepreneurship carries this inclusive broad meaning.

Notwithstanding the differences between entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship, what is common in SMEs and large enterprises is the primary purpose of profitably and sustainably producing various products and services to meet the socio-economic needs of the country and doing so better than competition.

In the end, the production activities of SMEs and large enterprises advance the quality of life for citizens.

Consequently, when as Zimbabweans we aspire to be a middle income by the year 2030, we are at the same time bestowing significant responsibilities to our SMEs and large enterprises to be more effective in their entrepreneurship and produce high quality and competitive products and services that can help us grow our economy and advance the quality of our lives.

Interestingly, when the world looks at what SMEs and large enterprises should do in terms of succeeding in their entrepreneurship, it predominantly considers all factors that fall under characteristics of a successful entrepreneur while circumventing or paying very little attention to the key factor of patriotism.

Having engaged and reviewed the entrepreneurship discourse, from the best of my knowledge, I have not come across academic articles, entrepreneurship text books, business conferences that devote much space to patriotic entrepreneurship.

Globally, entrepreneurship success is widely understood from the perspective of shrewdness, risk propensity, entrepreneurial opportunity recognition and exploitation, cashflows, profitability, shareholder value, market share, innovation, upscaling, proficiency in adapting to the complex and dynamic macroenvironment, bouncing back from failure and long-term business viability.