Los navegantes: A new beginning

For Diana Medrea-Mogensen, moving abroad and entrepreneurship have more in common

than we might think. Both require us to adapt, take risks and learn to navigate unfamiliar waters.

Photograph: Vlada Karpovich on Pexels

Text: Diana-Medrea Mogensen

I sometimes wonder whether I would ever have explored entrepreneurship if I had not moved to Denmark. I had never dreamed of owning a business, yet here I am, many years later, having built businesses myself and spent the last several years teaching entrepreneurship to other internationals.

My first business in Denmark started in 2012, not long after I arrived, when finding my place in the traditional labour market was proving difficult. I started a cake business, which meant that alongside learning how to live in a new country, I was suddenly learning how to operate a business in it.

Looking back, I suspect moving abroad helped make entrepreneurship imaginable at all.

There are around 10 million migrant entrepreneurs across OECD countries, and in 2022 immigrants represented approximately 17% of the self-employed population, compared with 11% in 2006. In two-thirds of OECD countries, immigrants are more likely to be self-employed than people born locally. The differences vary considerably between countries and migrant groups, and the reasons are equally diverse, ranging from recognising new opportunities to difficulties accessing traditional employment.

Still, when I look at internationals around me, I think there is another piece of the story. Long before we start businesses, moving abroad may already be teaching us some of the skills entrepreneurship requires.

I like to call us los navegantes, the navigators.

Becoming a navigator

Those of you who have moved countries probably recognise the experience. We leave, we arrive, we adapt, we fight, we contribute, we change and are changed in return. We learn new systems, cultures and ways of communicating; we build relationships from nothing, make mistakes, solve problems, lose parts of what used to define us and discover others along the way. Sometimes we break a little, then we rebuild and continue.

There is a paradox in all this. We become resourceful partly because many of our resources have disappeared. We learn to build networks because we have left ours behind; we become better at explaining ourselves because our previous experience may no longer speak for itself; we practise uncertainty because many of the things we previously knew how to navigate have suddenly become unfamiliar.

These are not necessarily advantages we would have chosen to acquire, yet they begin to resemble qualities we associate with entrepreneurship: adaptability, initiative, problem-solving, resilience, and the ability to make decisions without all the information.

“We may be navigating the same sea, but we are certainly not travelling in the same boat.”

The waters we come from

We do not arrive empty-handed; however, we also bring our ideas about work, success and entrepreneurship with us.

Depending on where you grew up, becoming self-employed may have represented success, independence and ambition, or it may have been what people did when they could not find a secure job. The business owner could be admired for creating wealth and employment while simultaneously being regarded with suspicion as someone interested in money, avoiding rules or probably not declaring everything they earned.

Over the last decades, Silicon Valley, startup culture and social media have added another image: the entrepreneur as innovator, risk-taker and visionary who leaves the safety of employment to build something extraordinary. Entrepreneurship became romanticised, although the older suspicions surrounding business owners never completely disappeared.

As internationals, we navigate between these narratives while learning those of the country where we now live.

This matters because entrepreneurship runs on trust. Customers, banks, suppliers, collaborators and institutions all need to trust us in different ways, while research on migrant entrepreneurship has documented disadvantages in access to finance, professional networks and institutional support. Bias and discrimination can add further layers depending on origin, ethnicity, gender and industry, although that deserves an article of its own.

Internationals are far from being one homogeneous group. Someone arriving in Denmark with a senior position, substantial savings and an established professional network is navigating very different circumstances from someone arriving without employment, recognised qualifications or financial security.

We may be navigating the same sea, but we are certainly not travelling in the same boat. Some have yachts, others have sailing boats or motorboats, while someone else may be hanging onto a floating door and simply trying to reach the shore.

Becoming legible again

Before moving, our education existed within a context; our professional experience required less explanation, and our way of communicating carried meanings that people around us understood. We had relationships accumulated over years and knew whom to ask when something went wrong.

Moving abroad can remove much of that embedded capital surprisingly quickly.

I experienced some of this myself when I arrived in Denmark. Starting a business did not magically remove the disadvantage; I still had to understand the system, only now I also had customers to convince, regulations to follow and a business to keep alive.

Research suggests that migrant entrepreneurs can nevertheless bring particular advantages, including knowledge of different markets, languages, international networks and stronger cross-border orientation. Living between systems also gives us comparison; we know from experience that the way something is done here is not necessarily the only way it can be done.

This may be one of the most useful things the navegante carries: the ability to see both the system we are entering and alternatives.

Opportunity, necessity, or something in between

OECD research shows that difficulties accessing salaried employment are one reason migrants enter self-employment, and in two-thirds of OECD countries newly self-employed immigrants are more likely than native-born entrepreneurs to have previously been unemployed.

That finding feels particularly relevant to me. I did not arrive in Denmark determined to become an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship appeared while I was trying to find a way forward.

Perhaps the distinction between opportunity and necessity is sometimes too clean. An obstacle can push us towards something that later becomes an opportunity, while an opportunity can demand skills we developed through circumstances we would never have chosen.

Years later, when I started working with other internationals through We Are Entrepreneurs, I began describing entrepreneurship as one possible route towards integration. I still believe that, although I understand the statement differently today. Entrepreneurship is not automatically the answer, and becoming international does not automatically make anyone a good entrepreneur. It simply means that some of us arrive at entrepreneurship having already practised starting again.

Learning to navigate Denmark

One of the most important lessons for a navegante is knowing where adaptability ends. Denmark offers considerable freedom to operate, but rules are taken seriously. Taxes, bookkeeping, employment conditions, permits, food regulations and deadlines are areas where assuming that there must be another way around something can become expensive. Good navigation requires understanding which currents can be worked with and which ones simply need to be respected.

The unwritten rules require just as much attention. Local entrepreneurs possess years of accumulated knowledge about how people communicate, where trust develops, which organisations matter and whom to call when something goes wrong.

As newcomers, we need to build some of that capital deliberately. We can join relevant organisations, return to the same networks often enough to develop actual relationships, speak with Danish entrepreneurs as well as other internationals, ask how things work and find people we trust enough to ask the questions that cannot be answered through Google.

At the same time, learning the Danish waters should not mean discarding everything we learned elsewhere. Our languages, cultural knowledge, international relationships and experience of other systems can reveal customers, solutions and opportunities that someone deeply embedded in one market may not notice

We do not have the same boats, resources, maps or starting points, and some of us will have considerably rougher journeys than others. What many of us share is the experience of having left a familiar shore and learned to find our way somewhere else.

The challenge is to learn the waters we are in without forgetting everything the journey has already taught us.