Youth entrepreneurship

To prepare the young to be globally competitive is not always about pushing them to speak good English. We need to teach them to think strategically like an entrepreneur. This is the mindset the Mandaue Chamber of Commerce and Industry (MCCI) wants to send to the academe and to the community. That it is not enough to prepare them for a job but for them to become also providers of jobs in the future.

In an effort to actualize the idea, thanks to its president Eric Mendoza, the chamber launched two years ago its enterprise version of the famous talent search American Idol with its "Business Idol" - an annual search of the best product and business plan prepared by students from participating colleges and universities in Cebu. The students compete on the basis of innovation, implementation and application of business principles and best practices.

University of Cebu-Lapu-Lapu-Mandaue Campus (UC-LM) emerged this year's winner with their healthful "malunggay and carrot sherbet." It was a well-deserved win for Mary Joy Celoso and John Roy Lastumen who did not only put together the innovation needed to win the nod of the panel but for having been able to defend their proposal intelligently before them. What surprised me even was the fact that UC also stood as last year's Business Idol champion. The successive feats only prove that UC is a league of its own or yet another breeding ground of future entrepreneurs for Cebu's business community.

I believe in the human capacity as much as I believe in the capacity of the youth to become successful in business even at an early age, which can only happen when we begin to cultivate the spirit of enterprise in them -- to enable them to become participants than just merely observers, listeners or learners. Thus, if we are to drive the industry of this nation we have to include the youth in the making of our economic blueprint enabling and empowering them to get their hands on the nature and kinetics of business where practical -- in school, community as well as in private and government enterprises. 

Business is a very practical, competitive, personal and evolving discipline. The rules can change in the middle of the game. You can only afford to commit so little mistakes, you need to be watchful of your competitors and more often than not takes a lot of communication to sell your products. In other words, it takes real experience for one to get the full appreciation of what business truly is however, commonly missed out in schools. When I used to evaluate feasibility studies (FS) of business students for a university before, it was very common to find an FS that was perfunctorily prepared for compliance and those that stand out not for their feasibility but for the diligence in following the rules of accounting and statistics yet still short of the practical wisdom that supports their study. The implementation of the FSs were mostly attempts to simulate than to offer real application. 

When I said that business is a practical discipline. Students must be taught thru experience. To use their persuasion skills to sell in the real markets, to learn how it is to borrow and pay for what they owe or to experience how it is to be broke.

This cannot be accomplished by the academe alone. I believe we have to start somewhere and I think the start was already initiated with the Business Idol as an example. The concept can be adopted at the school level where it will not be limited only to business students but to those who are enterprising enough to prove that it doesn't take a business student to do business. The idea can also expand to include the barangays and encourage out of school youth to compete or even as a permanent livelihood. We only need to come together to make these things happen in a grander scale.

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