By Olufemi Oni, Ilorin
A professor of Business Administration, University of Ilorin, Gunu Umar, has advocated the importance of creating a favourable internal environment to enable corporate entrepreneurship grow and flourish unhindered, while identifying five factors that are capable of catalysing the utilisation of corporate entrepreneurship.
Umar, who delivered the 227th Inaugural Lecture of the University, titled, ‘What matters now: Change matters’, said corporate entrepreneurship requires business organisations to become more flexible in their decision-making processes that concern innovation by involving their employees, adding that this would allow the pooling together of different views and ideas that can boost innovation capability.
He said: “There must be a favourable internal environment. The management must be willing to support the employees and encourage them to come up with new ideas. This requires giving the employees adequate time and enough freedom to take decisions with respect to their work. In addition, there must be a reward system that will motivate the employees to have interest in corporate entrepreneurship, and management should be willing to remove all the bureaucratic processes in the organisation.”
The Inaugural Lecturer opined that mass poverty in the country cannot be solved by any specific top down approach conceived by the elite, no matter how well conceived, but rather through the existing millions of micro solutions which, according to him, “can only be discovered and implemented by the mass poor themselves from the grassroots level”.
He said: ” To mobilise the mass poor to increase their individual productivity requires the development of micro enterprises. This will encourage and nurture self-employment.”
Umar admonished the University of Ilorin to set up a Creativity Isolation Centre, saying such Centres are designated conducive places where individuals can turn, as well as increase, new and imaginative ideas into fruition and reality.
In addition, he enjoined the University to establish Business Incubators which are specialised programmes structured as spaces for new businesses to learn and grow, saying it would offer services for entrepreneurs and start-ups, while giving reduced rates for supplies and work space.
The University, the Inaugural Lecturer added, also needs to establish Entrepreneurship Clinic which objective is to develop the highest quality, entrepreneurial-minded students with the skills to make significant impacts.