How To Make Africa More Innovative and Entrepreneurial – Part I

My exam is behind me now, and I can turn my attention back to topics that I would like to explore in this column. Before you ask me how the exam went . . . results come out in late July. Don’t worry, you’ll know if I pass because I’ll brag so loudly that you can’t bear but get fed up with me.

You may recall that my article How African Countries Can Spur Startup Innovation was inspired by an article published by BusinessWeek. I want to explore that topic further over the next two or three installments of this column. This time my inspiration comes primarily from How To Make A Region Innovative[1].

Before we dive in I should point out one important caveat. I am neither an economist nor a policy maker. Yet, I hope we can start and sustain a conversation that goes beyond my limited capacity to tackle a topic this enormous using the format of a series of “blog posts”.

Why the focus on “making Africa more innovative and entrepreneurial”? In two phrases, economic growth and poverty reduction. There is growing evidence to suggest that the internet is spawning an era of economic growth unlike any we have seen in history. In May 2011 The McKinsey Global Institute said[2]:

New McKinsey research into the Internet economies of the G-8 nations as well as Brazil, China, India, South Korea, and Sweden finds that the web accounts for a significant and growing portion of global GDP. Indeed, if measured as a sector, Internet-related consumption and expenditure is now bigger than agriculture or energy. On average, the Internet contributes 3.4 percent to GDP in the 13 countries covered by the research—an amount the size of Spain or Canada in terms of GDP, and growing at a faster rate than that of Brazil.

Africa has a rare opportunity to accelerate her efforts to diversify beyond the extraction and export of primary commodities and to create the conditions that will foster the growth of startups that harness the internet and software technology to build businesses that become successful enough to earn hundreds of millions, even billions, of dollars in annual revenue while employing hundreds if not thousands of her people in the process.

Ernest J. Wilson III states that four different sectors must link together to create a center of innovation (or innovation cluster), an environment that fosters creativity and innovation. He calls this the “quad” and it comprises;

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