Young Engineers and Scientists as the Mastermind of Sociopreneurship-based Community

Self-sufficient community can be defined as group of people consist of many classes of social life that has particular role to support the independency to sufficed its people’s principle commodity. In plural culture of civilization like Indonesia, community will contain people from wide range of social and regional backgrouds, but still we can be sure that basic human needs regardless of its social and regional background won’t be much different from each other. They will need acces to food, water, energy, clothes and home. But above all, they will need ‘acces-power’ from money,  place to actualize theirself up, and something that gives them certainity and sustained future in every condition even when economy recess strikes again someday. At this point, entrepreneurship will become a solution, especially small-medium entrepreneurship that is based on its social and human capacity. Or we can call it sociopreneurship / Social-entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship is the form of activity that chase profit based on original idea and led by one or a group of leaders independent from other companies. Entrepreneurship usually doesn’t need big amount of money to start , which is much easier to get compared to big industry. For example, one of the village at Pangalengan collecting money from its people for capital money of milk and beef commercialisation activity to outer world. They also establish natural strawberry field and farm tour for familly recreation, optimizing ‘back-to-nature’ slogan. Social entrepreneurship is the type of entrepreneurship which the profit is not the only and priority purpose. Its very purposes are to optimally exploit human resource so that won’t be any unemployed left, and to invest the profit for further business expansion or giving it back to the people that are working together in every level. In community that apply theory of soical entrepreneurship, economy recess will not be an issue that endanger them. In this community, they will tend to have more and more variably kind of businesses since they will always be new labor force to be exploited and more capital to invest. And in the end, this wil bear into less dependance community which is be able to suffice its own principle needs by its own potentials.

To start entrepreneurship, regardless what type of entrepreneurship it is, a community must have short term vision and long term vision. And both of them are manifested on a grandplan. Smart,time-based, and result-based grandplan. Sometimes, the substantial idea attached on that grand plan doesn’t require originality alone, what it need is sustainable and optimized way of doing something. And technology and applied science are there to complete it. I will elaborate simple example out of it, in junior high school i conduct observasion study to the village near my school about how they make salty eggs (telur asin), its whole process. After that, my biology teacher explain me and my fellow researchers scientific process and the very substantial step that they dont do on making this salty eggs. That was based in capilarity and osmosis-diffusion principle that needs firm tissue to optimize salt-water infiltrating eggs’ shell, and we make experiment out of it. Long story shorted, it result on longlasting, good-smell, and soft texture salty eggs (which usually isnt). The point of the story is, there are many entrepreneurships in the world that ‘coincidentally’ involved science in it, but only few of them that know exactly they involve science in it. And only the latter ones can make the so-called “sustainable and optimized way of doing something”. Because such a fundamental thing like science won’t stop giving us inpiration to develop and optimize works-mastermind, and process engineering will be much easier if we know the fundamental works behind it.

Actually, to apply and use technology, we don’t have to spend to much money to invest. Technology is all about exploiting principle way of scientific phenomenon, and sometimes even with principle mastermind and traditional raw material alone can realize the technology. Chemical Engineering Student on the early 2000’s made biogas plant only from simple ground-pit near farm, sheets of plastic paper, used drum, used ducts, and traditional stove for extracting biogas from kettle’s faeces. There’s no need to make aluminium-coated vessel, blast furnace, and other advanced technologies. And with it, it can suffice 2-3 famillies energy demmand for heating water and cooking food. The point is, we only need best practice principle and the spirit to use some technologies, regardless the situation. Because by aplying cheap technology and applied sciences, it will make remarkable ways of entrepreneurship as trigger to self-sufficient community.

As it was written in ‘my reason and objectives of joining this seminar’ column, to make the unthinkale thinkable for a community, they need us, the educated student and future leaders. Sometimes we have to be the trigger for them to see the potentials they always have, and they also need us to enlighten them about best practice of entrepreneurship as creator of self-sufficient community. And last but not least, of course our knowledge and familiarity to science and technolgy as Technology College Student will be stepstones for community to continually apply and use science&technology. In the college years, i got into two kind of activity to develop the community. The first one is still the same with high school years, giving applicable knowledge and working on some structural establishment to stimulate people do it by themselves independently. The second one, is the movement to get people in every level of civilization to be smartly and democratically involved in every government’s maneuvers by enlighting them with newest issues and political education. Those are the simplification about the role youth have to take in this matter.