Equity Group Foundation has been hosting their 3rd Annual Education and Leadership Congress at the Kenyatta University. The congress has been running from August 13th and is scheduled to end on 23rd.
The Group invited James Wabochi from Virtual City, Paul Kukubo from ICT BOARD, Anthony Mwai from IBM KENYA and Erik Hersman from I HUB
to take part in their panel discussion Innovating for Change. Hosted by
the Equity Bank CEO, Dr. James Mwangi, the panel members spoke of their
experiences and thoughts on innovation as they have seen it in Africa.
The 5000 students at the congress were some of the best from their
schools.
Though this is a good quality to possess, one cannot make it on
academic qualifications alone. There has to be a lot of effort put in
order to achieve success. When one talks about innovation in Africa,
there is a different way of looking at it. Thinking about connectivity
in Africa you would look at mobile phones before looking at computers.
To make money in the future, this the view most people have taken. It is
the reason for the success of Mpesa in Kenya. Innovation means
challenging the status quo, i.e. the paradigm that currently drives
business, universities and industries. For example, challenging the way
information flows in the media
.
As an innovation space, the iHub presents this case perfectly. The
iHub already has 8,700 members, technologists, investors, media
professionals and students, a cross-section that provides a view of
what’s going to happen next. To be a startup founder, there is no age or
educational limit. Having the ability to take a look at technology and
using it to lower the barrier for you to create services and products
gives you the chance to become successful. According to Erik Hersman,
there are two things that one has to be aware of to create a successful
start up companies, jump on the internet and learn from it in order to
be ready for what will be happen in the future and try to learn from
your experiences, especially your failures in order to create better
decisions in future.
Many times in John Waibochi’s vision, there have been mistakes, but
being able to peservere and learn from bad decisions has helped him
attain a success in his business. Mr. Waibochi was involved in the
popular Simu Ya Jamii project which then was a good idea but would not
make a very good business sense right now. He has since been involved in
other ground breaking business ventures including an Internet Service
Provider and a company that sold mobile phone scratch cards. At the time
there were only 18 such companies where presently there are 600. As CEO
of Virtual City, he has overseen the creation of mobile solutions that
are used in the agriculture sector and other industries.
IBM
has thrived on reading the market trends and creating products which
match the consumer demands. Having changed from creating typewriters to
mainframes and then to desktop PC’s. But the company made a mistake by
disregarding the operating system created by Bill Gates. Bill Gates went
on to become one of the richest men by profiting from the popularity of
his operating system. At one time, the company got rid of the divisions
that were still supporting old technology in order to continue being
relevant in the market. It is evident that change applies to both small
and big companies alike according to Tony Mwai, the IBM General Manager
for East Africa.
According to John Waibochi Kenyan innovators can take leadership in
what they are doing, especially in terms of mobile applications. This
can be done by posing critical questions. Mr. Waibochi asks, “Can we
create applications that we can export?” When considering outsourcing,
you have to look at what you are good at. Outsourcing works both ways
since you could be both a recipient and provider of outsourcing
services. “Kenyans have a lot of talent in IT training,” says Mr.
Kukubo, “In the middle tier of employment in South Africa, Ethipia,
Uganda and Rwanda, Kenyans are very dominant.” He mentions both the
education from school and gaining virtual experience as ways of
develloping talent in a country. As companies become more aggressive in
their growth, they demand more skills. This drives universities to
change their curriculum to develop skills that are not available in the
country.
In hiring, it is better to look at what one has done rather than what
they have learnt. Erik Hersman tries to interview people to find out if
they are smart and if they can get things done. “Being smart allows you
to learn anything, getting things done allows you to execute those
things,” says Erik Hersman. People who are top in their business possess
both these qualities. Very few universities in Kenya produce good
computer scientists, this is the same with most of the universities in
the world. The best computer scientists are those who set out to learn
on their own. Kenya has a competitive adventure in mobile technology.
Taking advantage of this puts you in a better place of leading the
world.
iHub research was built as a channel for people and companies who
want to do research and fund that research locally. By partnering with
Google and Intel, the iHub is building a supercomputer cluster which
will provide access to testing solutions created for big data. “Again we
are building a user experience lab and it’s the only one in Africa. So
small and medium enterprise companies like John’s (Virtual City) and
larger companies can test their applications,” says Erik Hersman. The
iHub is doing this so that Kenyan technology in future will be owned by
us and not by other people, by software and game developers.
Kenya’s innovation will be built around a lot of solutions being
invented to solve problems which do not have solutions today. We have a
great history of the Jua Kali sector. In the next 20 years, there is
going to be a margin between the hardware and the software where the
hardware is going to be as easy to use as the software.
C/O
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