A case of necessity being the mother of invention?

So the 2008 financial crisis had one upside. According to this article, the increasing dearth of jobs at major companies following the crash encouraged graduates and young job finders to start their own businesses.

A case of necessity being the mother of invention? Well, yes, but in this case invention is the mother of invention too. These young start-up founders would not have found such fertile ground for their ideas were it not for the leaps and bounds in the technological arena over the past decade. Server space is cheaper than it was, new innovations give you the opportunity to get a head start before others have caught on, and social media channels are not just free – they’re the principal, accepted means of marketing, giving you access to millions of people across the world.

What really pleased me about this piece, though, was this line: “[…] many now see the idea of founding their own company as more prestigious than joining a big firm”. Whereas, initially, this move towards a start-up culture was born of job scarcity, such initiative appears to have gained real prestige. And that’s fantastic – valuing innovation and risk over conformity and comfort is precisely what we need as we move into the fourth industrial revolution. It’s all about skills development.