Dragon's Den

Dragon's Den.

Photo Credit: marketingmag.ca

 Besides cooking my favourite spicy chicken curry and rice to eat, I love watching Dragon's Den on YouTube all day long. Kevin O'Leary's cynicism, Brett Wilson's shrewdness, Arlene Dickinson's compassion and Jim Treliving's calmness are all part of the reason why I am hooked up to it.

 What a great a concept to encourage entrepreneurship in a society?

 Canada's economic future lies significantly on this.

 But, looking in to it, is it really a great future for Canadian entrepreneurship?

 All the dragons that sit there are capitalistic investors. They all ask for the value of the company and how much sales has been done so far, and what is the circulation. In order to fit in to the model of the Den, one has to have a proven that their idea and product have raked a significant amount of monetary return on investment.

 This itself restricts the variety of businesses that are encouraged through the show. I do not want to sound like a stick in a mud and complain about the good initiatives the show produces. But, it is also very important that such issues are addressed. If not, all that are being invested in and become a success stories are the same old model of businesses where they need a production factory in China to mass produce in abundance, and then fill up the supermarket shelves and wait for their PR and Marketing department to do the rest of the job.

 However, as an alternate model, I would like to see Social Investors as dragons. Social investors that are not worried about the amount of product that has been sold, or the amount of money that has been made. Instead, the Social Dragons will be focusing on to what magnitude has a particular idea been effective to its society and environment. Keeping money for once out of the equation. We need to measure the amount of happiness an idea or product has brought to the society. This is no Hippie talk, the country Bhutan doesn't have a GDP, but a GHP. Which means General Happiness Product. They give importance to how happy their people are instead of how rich with money one is.

 Service sectors such as mental health care, senior homes, down syndrome centres and anything to do with education, should all be taken away from the monetary point of view. Having money as a common denominator undermines creativity. We need to build societies that are aware of alternate means of economic options. We need to encourage children to look in to their futures and have options to imagine them.

 Perhaps having local grassroots networking options for the local businesses will create chamber of commerce for them. That could expand their knowledge in business and connect them with international grass root businesses.

 After all, a free market economy belongs to all level and modes of businesses.