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The Chinese way to become an imaginative entrepreneur

How enterprising can one get?The Oxford Dictionary describes an entrepreneur as a person who sets up a business or businesses, taking on financial risks in the hope of profit. A very simple definition. Most of us aspire to make money in life, and to be our own bosses, hence we can safely assume that most of us aspire to be entrepreneurs.

However,most of us start off employed as we wait to kick off our entrepreneurship skills, skills which we never end up practising. Some of us, when employed, try out some form of entrepreneurship through small scale businesses, such as card making, drawing, cooking mandazis or chapos etc.

Well, you may argue that during creation, they may have forgotten to bestow you with a certain skill or talent that you can practise for some loose change. At the same time, you may also claim that you were not born with a silver spoon, be it a table or tea spoon, in your mouth hence your capabilities to try out any business are limited.

At the same time, you will read of how the Chinese , and a times the Indians, are very entrepreneurial and are now selling to the rest of the world resulting in a booming economy. At times, you may even wonder what the Chinese have that you do not.

For starters, imagination. To be a successful entrepreneur, you need to be quite imaginative, way imaginative than nature, like the Chinese are.

You see, the Chinese have discovered that you can process goods from crops, or even animal produce. Well, this has been happening for ages, so it is not something new. However, to get animal or crop produce, you need suitable climatic conditions to either rear the animals or grow the crops. This do not happen everywhere, and most of the times, demand in certain geographical areas for a product like milk, honey or wine may outstrip supply.

In such situations where demand outstrip supply, you can either bring the product in from other geographical locations where supply is higher , or you can modify climatic conditions to increase supply. Modifying climatic conditions can be done in ways such as greenhouses and irrigation.

Better yet, as an imaginative entrepreneur, you can actually create your own product. If milk, honey, wine and even eggs or flour are not sufficient enough where you live, you can emulate the Chinese and create artificial products, or modify the natural ones so that you have a higher quantity of a product under short supply.

Over the last two years, the Chinese have been caught adulterating powder milk, making artificial honey and recently making artificial wine.

In one instance, a farmer was sentenced to death for operating a training class in China which taught milk powder producers on how to add melamine to diluted milk so that it can appear to have more protein than it contained.

A second instance saw several wineries shut down over the Christmas period in China. One of the wineries was producing wine using filtered water, sugar, chemicals and grape flavouring. All I can do is pity those who were still sober after drinking bottles of this stuff.

In even another instance, the Chinese figured that they could do better than natural Chinese honey rejected in the USA due to high concentration of agricultural chemicals. The entrepreneurs went ahead to chemically manufacture some product that resembled honey. They even went ahead to ship the honey and repackage it in India , Indonesia and other countries so that it could appear that it came from those countries. The problem was that it was so cheap that the eventual buyer became suspicious and run lab tests on it. Well, it tasted like honey, looked like honey but was thinner than honey.

Well, at this point, am afraid of visiting China, and if I do, trust me to carry my own food and drink, or remain in a fast during my stay there.

Otherwise, these are important lessons on how we can be imaginative entrepreneurs, and make a killing while at it. A financial killing and kill several people who take toxic milk, honey or wine. Meanwhile, I am off to figure whether its possible to artificially produce cheaper eggs or whether de-colourised dirty water is a better short in arid areas.

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