A Call for Change

The quest for economic survival is every country’s concern. With the current global financial crisis, people are becoming aware of the vivid effects it brought about in their lives. Indeed, many firms tend to restructure their businesses in order to cope with the current situation. More so, they decided to terminate their business operations because of insurmountable losses. With these, how can a country grow economically in turbulent times?

According to Lynda M. Applegate, Harvard Business School professor, “the global financial crisis we are experiencing provides a sobering reminder of what happens when innovation fails to drive economic growth”.

Despite massive investments, we can notice that people still lack long term sustenance even thought their spending increased. Logically, we can say that all these money come from debts. Their money is only enough to pay one debt from another. Corollary to these, savings rates approaches zero.

We cannot solve our economic problems by “spending more money to buy bad debts”. This is where innovation comes into place where people will be mobilized to create jobs towards productive economy. Innovation is essentially what keeps mankind moving forward and changes the way we live for the better. Business firms or even simple individuals can survive by identifying and taking advantage of the areas where innovations can be applied. These will somehow fuel economic growth in the future.

In areas of innovation, people tend to look for opportunities where they could start or restructure their businesses. The status quo of our country tells us that opportunity exists in every aspect of the industry. It is just a matter of how people pursue it for their own benefit.

In the IT industry, opportunities are arising to incremental developments that will give way to new methods and topics that will broach new ideas like in the field of nanotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence.

Meanwhile, oil prices continue to rise and fall in the market due to instability. With these, businesses which offer services of conventional source of energy such as coal products and other alternatives are seeing rapid growth as they try to exploit opportunities for their advantage.

Many of these are short- term opportunities. However, these can build important foundations towards long- term productive economy.

Furthermore, ordinary people can also contribute to the economic condition by starting to venture on a business even a small one. It is already a big contribution to the industry.

Starting a new business seems to be a challenging job at the first impression. It requires “great effort, resilience and good management skills”. There are many factors that need to be considered. According to Sara Dillon on her article in articlesbase.com, there are five critical stages in starting a business- planning, finances, market research, marketing and business plan execution.

Considering all of these, we can clearly see that starting a business is associated with risks. It is important that people carefully manage the opportunities accompanied by it. There might come a time that it will fail or succeed. Either way, it is important that entrepreneurs learn in every fall they have and eventually use this as a stepping stone to succeed.

In these turbulent times, people are still left with a choice on how to face the current crisis that our country has. As an entrepreneur, there should be a thorough planning on whatever decision you take to revive your business. It may be time to rethink business processes, markets and structure to achieve growth. Also, be in the lookout for different opportunities that might come your way. After the crisis, there might be other persons that need your help- reach for them.

All in all, we see how we were taken by the changes that come our way. Changes will come as the world tries to meet the ever-growing demands of people. With these, let us acknowledge that applying change is not bad at all. Sometimes, this is all we need to improve what we have.

So when we are asked how to cope with these turbulent times, simply say, I’ll make a change now. Together we will not just survive- we’ll prosper at the same time.



Sources:

Asor, W.A.,Ph. D. Entrepreneurshipin the Philippine Setting
Rex Bookstore Philippines, Copyright, 2009.

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