'Gen Y' strongly creative, study finds

They also “love to utilise digital technology” in extending business opportunities to all over the world.

Many Gen Y people in Thailand build their wealth from the stock market, having more than Bt10 million in bank deposits by the time they are 30, the global study found.

Gen Y people, aged between 16 and 29, have been pioneering to great success in small to medium-sized businesses, said Pathamawan Sathaporn, head of business planning at Mindshare Thailand.

“Thai Gen Y is a very much part of this global phenomenon. This includes tips from trend-setting tech start-ups, channelling the power of advocacy, and creating a genuine value proposition,” she said yesterday.

According to the study, more and more young people are motivated by the need to be original. They seek to break away from the clutches of the corporate world to take that one big step to bring their innovative ideas to life.

Today’s youth are assertive and ambitious, daring to defy the system as they seek to define their own life path, the study found. Amidst an evolving world view in the wake of a global recession, “today’s youth embark on a journey towards financial freedom, beyond defining themselves through the careers they choose”.

In a world that struggles to recover from the fiscal crisis with a looming threat of a relapse, young people have taken charge of their own futures as they choose not to merely indulge themselves in their interests, but rather be “the embodiment of their passions by seeing their own unique visions through their ventures”.

Living in the digital age has also made available a wide array of channels for youth to develop their entrepreneurial ideas and take them to the global stage, the study found.

Pathamawan said young entrepreneurs from Thailand place a premium on creativity in launching their new business concepts, while their counterparts from more traditional economies, such as Portugal, prefer to take the tried-and-tested route. 

Most young entrepreneurs in Malaysia prefer the slow-but-sure approach as they eventually turn their part-time interests into full-time endeavours, while more than half of young Argentinians prefer to launch their own companies rather than work for someone else.

Young entrepreneurs in Argentina and Japan rank high in terms of creativity, while confidence embodies business ideas from the UK and Indonesia, she said.

Almost 60 per cent of China’s Gen Y population are open to the idea of taking risks, while only 15 per cent of their counterparts in Japan are willing to do so.

Hong Kong’s business landscape is experiencing a paradigm shift with the emergence of Gen Y social entrepreneurs, while South Korea’s counterparts have preferred to embark on tech start-ups, owing to the country’s well-developed infrastructure.

Youth across the world’s fastest-developing countries, such as Brazil, foster a more entrepreneurial mindset than in more stable economies such as Australia, she added.

Mindshare has launched the first edition of the quarterly trend series, “Culture Venture”, which identifies the entrepreneurial spirit of Gen Y across 32 countries around the world.

The study identifies 14 types of entrepreneurial business types. These can be broken into three types of entrepreneurial behaviours that brands can adopt in their communication strategies.

These behaviours apply to pioneers, who often found venturing to become a game changer, and take innovation to heart; social explorers, who are independent and adventurous, driven by a quest for authenticity and meaning and a desire to give back to the community and express their own individuality; and creators, who are non-conformists and motivated primarily by self-expression, and are also driven by a desire to create something of enduring value.