Entrepreneurship and Technology Diversification: A Strategy or Desperation? FAM Case Study

Entrepreneurship demands drive, self-motivation, perseverance and above all finding out business opportunities, when others don't. Personal and business failures often build resilience, a requisite quality in a successful entrepreneur's acumen. Business opportunities have a life cycle, some long, some short and some with stagnancy. Some of them rewards the entrepreneur immediately, some in the long term and some phase out gradually with time. Very often, disruption changes the pattern of business life cycle too. A truly proactive strategy of Diversification is by adding new business (es) to an existing array of portfolio to improve overall return for a business enterprise. This strategy could be, to develop new product I service or expand to a new or existing market which is rewarding. A planned initiative to diversify, therefore, is also a technique to thin out the effects of negative impact of businesses, especially, at the declining stage of its Life cycle. History, however, is replete with instances where businesses have been driven to choosing Diversification as resort to bail out the existing pitfall, mostly as a result of the decline of, what was once perceived to be a perennial profitable opportunity. Should the strategy of Diversification, therefore, be seen as a challenge to an entrepreneur's proactive risk taking ability or should it be seen as a defensive/ reactive strategy which business compulsions drive him to? The following case study poses a challenge to budding as well as seasoned entrepreneurs and hopefully stimulates the thought process as to what, when, why and how to go about diversifying the business portfolio to establish a sustainable business with reasonable longevity.