Declaration | Humane Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is the energy which fuels the continuous innovation of society through solving poverty and creating employment. Flourishing entrepreneurship makes enterprises healthy with the creation of employment and value leading to a healthy society. We understand that entrepreneurship so far has focused on the creation of resources and profit for entrepreneurs which has caused adverse effects on the healthiness of firms themselves and had led SMEs to pay less attention to the employees and society as well.
The declaration of Humane Entrepreneurship pursues shifting SMEs to focus more on employees and society rather than on ownership and profit. This in turn would eventually promote the creation of a society where people become happy. Humane Entrepreneurship starts from the dreams of entrepreneurs. They then share this dream with the organization members, making them work with excitement. This results in the creation of value, employment, and a healthy society. For this, we propose the 10 principles of Humane Entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurs should first turn their dreams into reality with the five principles of the Enterprise Cycle: Envisioning, Enthusiasm, Enlightenment, Experimentation, and Excellence. After which, entrepreneurs should share the abovementioned principles with their employees together with the five principles of the Human Cycle: Empowerment, Ethics, Equality, Engagement, and Ecosystem. When entrepreneurs’ dreams materialize and they excite their organization members by sharing these dreams, they could create the best working environment.
As countries and organizations move towards holistic growth, enterprises should extend their priorities beyond the profit margin. These companies should shift this focus onto its people, the environment, and society. Great entrepreneurs with strong humane mindsets fuel the concept of Humane Entrepreneurship. Human oriented businesses are deemed to perform better and come up with better products and services, ultimately satisfying their customers. We recognize Humane Entrepreneurship is a key to sustainable development of not only enterprises but also of society.
As the focus of entrepreneurship shifts from culture to culture, this study seeks to identify which characteristics are important for different countries and organizations. The development of this concept is an attempt to incorporate the humane factor into any entrepreneurial behavior. In practice, this new type of entrepreneurship will show several important traits that might not be usual in the traditional sense.
As an update of the Jakarta Humane Entrepreneurship Declaration, we develop the Seoul Declaration and propose to share this as a global endeavor. This undertaking aims to ascertain the current status and future direction of small and medium enterprises in terms of globalization, innovation and humane entrepreneurship. It also seeks to identify the importance of various characteristics, the 10 Es of Humane Entrepreneurship.
