Beyond the Hero-Entrepreneur – Team Entrepreneurship for organizational resilience

Given a lack of widespread entrepreneurial education and dramatic start-up failure rates, effective capacity building has proven critical to unlock the potential of entrepreneurship for employment and development in Kenya and elsewhere. In our challenging business environment, successful entrepreneurship not just depends on a value-adding solution or even a well-designed business model. The concept of Hero-Entrepreneurship has failed its hype, as individual, hierarchically operating entrepreneurs are prone to leadership failures or creating serious growth bottlenecks. Only entrepreneurs who are able to build exceptionally strong and well-connected teams, effectively unlocking and drawing on the strength of each contributor, will establish true resilience in the face of challenges, or go beyond that to reach ‘antifragility’, the capability to grow stronger from every challenge in a sustainable way.

Enhanced start-up capacity building

This entrepreneurs’ camp will provide unique opportunities for participants to experience cutting-edge approaches in the areas of group processes, collaboration and co-creation tools, prototyping, and creation of an eco-system specific to the prevailing situations affecting entrepreneurship in Africa. It will invite participants into a new culture of working cognizant of the dynamically changing technological and socio-cultural working environment of global business trends. In addition to this, the camp is designed with the traditional needs of entrepreneurship regarding idea generation, business development, and growth strategies in mind. It is because of this blend between traditional entrepreneurship empowerment and the new cutting age approaches in group processes and collaboration that makes this camp not only inspirational but specifically tailored for impact entrepreneurship.

Experiential learning and applicable tools

This three day workshop seeks to bring together 30-50 young entrepreneurs passionate about catalyzing positive change in their environment. The workshop journey will take them to a higher level of self-leadership and effective collaboration within and across organizations, unlocking the flexibility and creativity needed to tackle the manifold challenges they face. The camp will provide a unique space of reference to experience leading-edge approaches and enabling participants to take home applicable tools and lasting network contacts.

The workshops will offer knowledge and advice on growth and business development, while aiming to nurture leadership both on a personal and inter-personal level. The aim of self-leadership is to achieve more integration between the actions of the individual with their core values by exploring their deeper motivation, fears and obstacles for personal growth. The inter-personal leadership tools used in the workshop will explore the potential of collective leadership as an effective alternative for classical hierarchical leadership structures in enterprise development. A range of new tools and approaches will be valuable assets for the participants in navigating leadership and collaboration challenges within their enterprises.