By Rishi Khosla, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, OakNorth
For World Economic Forum
Photo: Many entrepreneurs are seeing the world’s challenges as opportunities to build socially minded businesses.
Image: REUTERS/Eloisa Lopez
The last few years of unprecedented economic disruption look set to continue in 2023. The recent sell-off in equity markets, challenging funding rounds and significant lay-offs give us a glimpse of what the upcoming downturn has in store.
But counterintuitively, it is exactly these kinds of challenges that will create the perfect conditions for new businesses to be born and built. The best entrepreneurs thrive in times of turmoil. They know how to channel their fears and respond to – and even shape – disruption. They are non-conformists, unafraid to question convention and try something new. They can play a vital role in developing the new products and services we need to drive the global economy forward and overcome the inevitable challenges that will emerge.
Emergence of a new form of entrepreneurship
As an entrepreneur myself, one thing above all lets me remain an optimist: everywhere I look, I see a new generation of founders building or planning to build new businesses.
In the UK, we’ve already seen the ongoing cost-of-living crisis spur a new trend towards entrepreneurialism, including more women than ever. Almost a fifth of women (17%) are considering starting a business; nearly half (48%) cite a desire for more money and more freedom of being their own boss as the motivation for getting started.