The Computer Society of Kenya

Since 1986

icttrainingDAILY NATION By BITANGE NDEMO

Monday August 3, 2015

This week, the University of Nairobi opens its doors to the world as it showcases local innovation at its main campus. 

The Innovation Week starts with a two-day pre-expo presentation of academic papers from across the world, followed by workshops on innovation management and ecosystem development by teams from the United States and Israel. 

The main purpose of the event is to celebrate local innovation and demonstrate how research feeds into innovation through technology transfer, commercialisation, strengthening of IP frameworks, innovatively delivering education, and energising relationships between private sector, academia and government.

As a country, we are at a critical juncture. We can either choose to be part of global innovation systems or be content with the status of being a developing country that looks up to others to innovate, even around problems that sit with us.

The Innovation Week, which is a new initiative by Vice-Chancellor Prof Peter Mbithi, is expected to remove the silo mentality within not just the university, but also our country as a whole.

It will also bring together resources to tackle our own problems and possibly scale some of the solutions to other parts of the world.

I say this from my experience having been at the centre of the first wave of innovations in local ICTs, where it took a lot of sacrifice to develop and nurture what we celebrated at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES).

Although this will be an annual event, we hope that as we inaugurate this novel idea, we shall begin the process of launching the university accelerator program and break ground for Nairobi Innovation Hub to accelerate entrepreneurship and job creation.

The hub, as well as the Innovation Week, will not necessarily cater for ICT, only, but will be a multidisciplinary hub that cuts across all sectors of the economy.

The weeklong expo will be graced by Prof Jacob Kaimenyi, the Cabinet Secretary for Education  Dr Fred Matian’gi, the Cabinet Secretary for Information and Communications, and Mr Saul Singer, the co-author of Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle.

Mr Langdon Morris, one of the world’s leading thinkers on innovation, will talk about innovation management at institutional level.

The event marks a beginning, with universities in the developing world taking their rightful mandate in furthering economic and social development through research and innovation, in addition to disseminating knowledge.

Critics will doubt whether this can happen where the focus has only been in teaching with virtually no policy support in research, but this has changed over the past decade. New policies and institutional frameworks have been put in place to facilitate research and innovation.

Kenya is among Africa's leaders in spending on research as a percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP), and there is new thinking on the role of innovation in entrepreneurship, as was seen from the GES summit held here last week. Kenya’s young people have responded with disruptive innovations that are beginning to be felt not just locally, but globally.

There remain many challenges as we push for innovation and entrepreneurship.  These include our lone-ranger mentality, aversion to new disruptive technologies, an educational system that does not support creativity as a strategy for sustained growth in innovation, and a debilitating mentality of self-doubt.  We must face these challenges head-on if we are to succeed.

There is greater need to collaborate more widely but this is not happening. Yet what has helped the developed world is the close collaboration between industry, research and policy.

Unfortunately, many young innovators have been working alone, without the benefit of research as happens elsewhere.  For example, those working to develop new products in the health sector need a health research team to help them understand health problems before they embark on developing the solution. 

Such collaborations may include entrepreneurship experts to craft new business models or ways of maximizing revenues out of new innovations. This lone ranger mentality continues in an era of collaboration. People must collaborate either as partners or or as clients to exploit emergent opportunities.  The consequence of operating in silos is not just individual failure but it also may affect the economy.

Success in entrepreneurship depends on the resources that drive its growth. However,  some of the resources that appear plentiful are sometimes scarce. Many of the unemployed youth are at the same time averse to new technologies that improve on productivity. 

At the recent pre-GES conference at the Kenya International Convention Center, a young lady narrated how she had not been able to get good joinery carpenters in her modern technology workshop.

There are many such opportunities, but the challenge of adapting to new and disruptive technologies continue to keep our youth unemployed. This trend will continue, since virtually every trade has been invaded by new technologies. 

Much has been said about our education system. If we cannot overhaul it, then we need to introduce courses in creative thinking. Creative thinking skills require a setting where the student is left to think without pressure, which is different from our usual rote learning where the teacher is the master.

Over time, research has shown that learning that is open, more relaxed and almost playful builds more creative students who are capable of taking risk.  Risk-taking is one of the essential elements for entrepreneurship.  

Our current education approaches may perhaps explain why there is a high failure rate among the youth and women entrepreneurship Funds. They have no capacity for risk.

Such failure can be reversed if some training on entrepreneurship were to be offered and the burden of identifying entrepreneurial opportunity shifted to the loan provider. 

For example, the fund should advertise for a number of women to run a tomato paste cottage industry in Kiambu, then advertise for another group of women in Muranga to supply 5,000 tonnes of tomatoes to the Kiambu women’s group.  A third advert in Nairobi would be for women distributors of tomato paste from Kiambu. 

Each women’s group in the supply chain would be productive one way or another and avoid a situation where all women’s groups are supplied with capital and all of them grow tomatoes, flooding the market and causing prices to plummet and destroy everyone’s’ prospects.

 We can replicate this with other products across the 47 counties creating industries, jobs and satisfied women and youths. This process innovation is a major construct in entrepreneurship but is rarely applied by the politicians.

Several years down the road when we are all gone, our great-grandchildren will look at how we dealt with the challenges of unemployment and wonder if any rational person lived in our time. They will look at us the same way we look at the 1900 picture below of a street dentist in Asmara, Eritrea.

Unknown Photographer in Nicolas Monti’s Africa Then Photographs 1840-1918.

One of the greatest benefits that we took home from the GES is the confidence to innovate, and President Obama validated our capability to innovate.

We must go out with this confidence and tackle other challenges facing Africa today.  In the past we were afflicted with a debilitating disease of self-doubt to the extent that even a locally produced Kitenge was shunned in preference to one made in Netherlands.

We must begin to consume our innovations as a strategy to expand to other markets.  More often than not, we are pulled into negative thoughts about Africa, which are sometimes propagated by Africans based on past experience. 

We must come up with a counterbalance to emphasise emerging narrative of Africa rising. I have been to all continents and there is none that does not have its own challenges; some of the challenges other continents face make our problems far more palatable.

This does not mean we keep quiet about some of the problems that portray Africa in a bad light, but that we must collectively tackle each problem the best way we can. Instead of blaming the government for not training women and youth entrepreneurs, pick it up yourself and train 10 entrepreneurs, showing them new opportunities to avoid the duplication that make us look as though we just arrived on earth yesterday. 

Create networks such that if the Ugandans are looking for tomato paste, link them to the Kiambu women group in the example above. The Dutch for example, exclusively eat the breast from their chicken; the rest is destined for African countries (see page 5) at prices that are impossible to compete with and all this marketing is done through extensive networks.

Bill Gates once said, “Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.”  Let us harness the ability of collaboration and change our future through social and economic innovations.

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