THE DEVELOPMENT OF ENTERPRENEURSHIP IN A DEPRESSED ECONOMY (ECONOMICS PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS)
INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
In a depressed country like ours, global development is entering a phase where entrepreneurship will increasingly play a more important role. There is a need for the Nigerian economy to sustain growth through sustainable access to resources, knowledge, markets, and industrialization putting a premium on innovative entrepreneurship.
There is no doubt that Nigeria is naturally blessed with entrepreneurship opportunities; yet the realization of the full potential of these opportunities has been dampened by the adoption of inappropriate industrialization policies at different times. Several policy interventions that were aimed at stimulating entrepreneurship development via small and medium scale enterprises promotion, based on technology transfer strategy, have failed to achieve the desired goals as it led to the most indigenous entrepreneurs becoming distribution agents of imported products as opposed to building in-country entrepreneurial capacity for manufacturing, mechanized agriculture and expert services (Thaddeus, 2012).
Entrepreneurship is the cornerstone and at the heart of the free enterprise economy (Popoola, 2014). Entrepreneurship is an activity that involves the discovery, evaluation and exploitation of opportunities to introduce new goods and services, ways of organizing, markets, processes, and raw materialthrough organizing efforts that previously had not existed (Shane and Venkataraman, 2000; Venkataraman, 1997).
Economic development here refers to a qualitative process that describes changes in the overall economy aiming to enhance the economic well-being of a community regardless of its size. In economic literature, economic development is frequently described as being a three-legged stool where each leg represents one economic development strategy. The first leg usually refers to business attraction; the second one to business retention and the third one to entrepreneurship development. However, because this analogy assumes the existence of equality and separation among economic development strategies, more useful analogy is that of a pyramid as Dabson (2005) pointed out.
