An Entrepreneur Point-of-View About Policies to Support Innovation in Sharing Economy Era

Abstract

Entrepreneurship can take form as intrapreneurship within an established company, creation of new businesses, and innovation of processes. Creation of new businesses have important part in prosperity and development of regions, where the entrepreneurs are the actors who make the new businesses. Innovation is both the cause and result of every entrepreneurship, while research and development is the key to that innovation. An invention of product, service, or process has four distinct steps to become an innovation : research, development, demonstration, and commercialization. Authorities and agencies should provide incentives directly affecting the original innovator to reach commercialization of the product, service, or process. In sharing economy, consumers take part as the producers and consumers at the same time, companies no longer completely control the resources they sell, and business models constantly change. To regulate sharing economy, government have five options : entirely ban the sharing economy activities, do not make any new regulation as long as the stakeholders do not professionally conduct their businesses, let the market stakeholders regulate themselves, make entirely new regulations based on the inputs from all stakeholders or make temporary experimental laws. Entrepreneurship promotional agencies should avoid the trap of attracting the relocation of companies or startups from one homogenous sector, instead, the agencies should create conducive ecology for new companies creation and development from diverse sectors. Government and regulators should aim to minimize the policies’ complexity, resource consumption, unnecessary hindrances, to support the entrepreneurs. Government can actively support both conventional companies and sharing economy companies, at the same time, by consulting the affected parties to provide suitable policies for sustainable development.