The Making of An Innovator – The Innovate for Africa Experience

I had thought of entrepreneurship as proffering solutions to the challenges of the target market without paying attention to data to substantiate whether the idea is viable or not. I have realized that the reason why over 80% of businesses fail within their first few years of establishment comes from lack of shared thinking most especially as this entirely has to do with the prospective customers regardless of the bias of the promoter or initiator of the idea.

I have undergone four weeks of the Innovation readiness training with Innovate for Africa and the learning experience has been a mix of lessons, exercises and projects on different subjects designed to not just inspire innovation in the development of products and services but to support the initiation of creative thoughts, concerted with grit and determination to see this idea move from conception to implementation.

The Team behind Innovate for Africa has put together a robust learning curriculum which has the capacity to increase the competitive advantages of the fellows.

I took four different courses during the innovation experience and they are listed as follows

1. Personal Branding

The personal branding sessions made me to understand the importance of having a robust profile online. I had learnt firsthand, that when an organization wants to hire a professional for a job or project, the first thing they do is to utilize search engines. This audit moved me to work on the creation of a website as required in the project in order to showcase my personal brand which comprises of my skills, experiences, qualifications and projects I have worked on that could increase my chances of getting selected by an organization.

I was eventually going to learn through other sessions how to create blog posts, webpages and update my resume to an acceptable standard. What was most stunning was the creation of a one-page resume which summarizes all my professional experiences.

2. Design Thinking

The design thinking course had a major lesson in that it brings together a set of techniques to set the ball of innovation rolling, which has been used by most successful start-ups that exists today.

This was the most tedious and also rewarding experience as I learnt about what a hackathon was and developed a product alongside my team to help manage health records in hospitals. I learnt developing the pitch deck and presenting and elevator’s pitch to the judges. The validation of our digital product NimraHealth was a big success to the team.

3. Strategic Analysis

Innovate for Africa understood the need to engage clients and the strategic analysis had to make us dig into the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats while we worked with Splitspot – a real estate company in Boston, United States.

This singular opportunity of being able to simulate on this project the need to support Splitspot with insights into using data to increase sales helped me to understand the art of customer service and development of communication skills.

4. Hard Skills Lab

I had applied to utilize my skills as a Data Analyst and to support the development of this skill, Innovate for Africa made a learning environment possible through paced learning by adopting a specific range of tools, tutorials and activities to internalize this skill and deploy it at work.

This lifelong experience from Innovate from Africa has made me understand that the rigour in entrepreneurship are quite much and grit is needed to manage a successful start-up.

I wish aspiring entrepreneurs would subject their ideas to qualitative and quantitative form of analysis before launching it into a product or service.

It was challenging at first to understand how synchronous and asynchronous sessions would happen, however as the days of experience kept increasing, my ability to learn moved very fast as I adapted to the use of the tools adopted and began to use them.

I am proud of the fact that I could contribute to a growing body of skills and knowledge by engaging with other great minds by supporting the development of the client’s strategic session, the pitch, data cleaning and analysis and proposing a recommendation to initiate growth.

I was surprised at the ability of the team to put together a robust amount of content, learning materials and exercises.

Another exciting part of the Innovate for Africa Fellowship is the exposure to a wide variety of resource persons who are themselves entrepreneurs who spoke on different subjects to support our dreams of building a start-up in the nearest future.

Working with different team members such as Chilo Nwoko, Feyi Sadiku, Ugonna Okore and a host of others made the learning experience worthwhile.

Speakers

They include Faith Adesemowo, the Founder of Social Lender and her grit to understanding the needs of the market in providing businesses with credit facilities to support their growth.

I learnt from the sessions of Drugstoc Founder, Chibuzo Opara who had to work three jobs in order to support his business before going full time.

Mr Michael spoke about his journey into entrepreneurship and I learnt about how one could master a lot of competencies and make them converge into one single offering.

I also had an interactive session while Mr. Efosa spoke about The Prosperity Paradox and how we can help third world nations get out of poverty through innovation.

Every other session was as insightful as the other as Vivian, Fehintolu and Chiedo took turns to tell us about their respective journey and how they are adapting to the growth and price that comes with running a start-up

Moving forward, I hope to build a start-up in the logistic industry to support the movement of items from one place to another.