During the Afrikoin conference in Nairobi, we were lucky to attend the Demo Day of the Savannah Fund, a Kenya-based VC betting on startups all over Africa. Because sometimes (even for me!), a picture is worth thousands words, I’ll just leave you browse this Slideshare. Startups are all working on local behaviors (gifting from the…
Category: Learnings from conferences
An education to entrepreneurship in Africa: from hack schools to long-term capability building in innovation
The story of Njeri Chelimo is a compelling one, and a case study for the proverb “where there is a will, there is a path”. This 20 y.o Kenyan girl had planned to attend a hack school in New York a few months ago. The 12-week program was free to attend, and would be a great…
A archeology of innovation and startups in Kenya with Mbwana Alliy from the Savannah Fund
As you may know, we were in Kenya both to attend Afrikoin, a conference on mobile money, and to continue our exploration of innovation ecosystems. How do countries, cities, are turning to entrepreneurship? What are the fundamentals and best local practices when they try to build and nurture communities of innovations? After Afrikoin, we had…
A brief history of Kenya mobile money system M-Pesa
During Afrikoin, the first mobile money and digital currency held in Nairobi, I’ve met with Brian Muthiora. Brian joined the local branch of GSMA, the telecom operators professional association, after 5 years at Safaricom handling the regulation issues for MPesa, the mobile money system designed by the Kenyan telco. And during an hour or so,…
Intercultural awareness and innovation: can startups really go global?
To continue our exploration of Kenya as an innovation ecosystem in fringe of Afrikoin, I’ve met with Samuel Gichuru from the Nailab incubator. A fast-paced and jittery conversation proved useful to pinpoint a key challenge of entrepreneurs: the management of cultural differences. If Kenya is the kingdom of mobile money, through its MPesa system, it’s…
Somali diaspora and mobile money: a research on hawala presented at Afrikoin
After a few panels and talks on mobile money at Afrikoin, we had the opportunity to listen to Gianluca Iazzolino, a researcher from the University of Edinburgh. Gianluca works on the way Somali people deal with mobile money as a people that moves a lot – for political reasons with refugees, but also as they…
E-commerce in East Africa: key findings from iHub Research team in Nairobi
The #Afrikoin conference is organized and hosted by iHub, Kenya’s famous and main innovation platform for web technologies. Their research arm, iHub Research, gave us a few insights on a research they have been running in East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda) on e-commerce. The first e-commerce ventures in East Africa used to focus on affluent…
Africa is the future, but how to make it happen?
The quality and diversity of panelists and delegates of the Global Entrepreneurship Summit make it possible from Kuala Lumpur to learn a lot about distant innovation and startup ecosystems, as we’ve shown with these insights from Russia, Indonesia, New York. We’ve met also a lot of people from Africa, and have tried to connect as…
How Russia, Tanzania, Indonesia and the US analyze their own startup ecosystems
Answering the question “what is the 2nd best innovation ecosystem in the world” is both a provocation and a eye-opening. No one seems to be able to think out of what the Silicon Valley has built over the last 50-60 years (see this cool timeline from NPR). And the second “rank”, if it still makes…
Towards an entrepreneurial university
Universities are both a place for innovators to learn and grow, and sometimes an obstacle to innovation. On the one hand, companies like Google are tightly intertwined with the support from their universities, a place to grow ideas, research, patents, and to find sometimes a first driver for growth. On the other hand, many universities…