January 2021 what a month it turned out to be! I used to think that entrepreneurship and innovation required some kind of other-worldly inspiration or idea to disrupt industry, business models on one’s way to creating a high growth startup. I got a wake-up call during my one-month innovation readiness training as part of the January 2021 Innovate for Africa fellowship. Where do I start from in describing the experience?
Key Values
The Innovation Readiness Training and fellowship is built on a foundation of five (5) key values:
Innovation: Fellows are encouraged to innovate using whatever resources available to them
Collaboration: True innovators realize they cannot achieve their goals on their own and must learn to work with others especially helping them emphasize their strengths and improve on their weaknesses
Grit: When the going gets tough the tough go harder
Growth Mindset: Mistakes are an important part of growth. Learn from them and get better
Inclusivity and Diversity: Every voice can be heard and we will still make beautiful music
The Team
The IFA team was amazing in ensuring the growth of fellows in the space of one month. From daily sessions to develop our ourselves in several core areas which I would touch on much later in this blog. They were also supportive in giving us feedback on our turned in assignments, mock interviews and sessions to test our readiness for when we would face startups looking to recruit innovators on match day.
To the team, Quadri, Margaret, Mary, Viviana, Mozi, Maria, Sima and Megan words cannot express the immense growth myself and I’m fairly certain the same will be said by the other fellows have experienced in the last month.
The Program
The program is divided into three key modules: personal branding, hackathon/design thinking and hard skills lab.
Personal Branding: Fellows were given tasks and lessons on building their resumes and portfolio in order to make them more marketable to potential employers, clients and partners. As important as your body of work is, how you present it to outside stakeholders may determine the type of interest you get from them. As fellows we were made to reflect on what message our resumes and portfolios told others.
Hackathon – FarmSmart
I have already written about here: https://mogbitseo.wixsite.com/website/post/farmsmart-my-ifa-journey-to-aiding-farmers-in-nigeria.
However, that post does little justice to describe the growth myself and my team experienced in completing our hackathon project. What started as just an idea on how to aid farmers became quite a challenge when it came time to choose an idea that had practical application given the constraints of building such a solution in a developing nation like Nigeria. Our team came up with several brilliant ideas on how best to implement this solution from using a voice solution that gives farmers information on funding and access to markets, to an SMS solution for individual farmers and/their unions, a newsletter to give farmers first hand information on funding and markets. We tested each idea with potential stakeholders and finally settled for an SMS solution where farmers may register directly or through their unions to get information and access to funding and markets. This takes me back to our values as IFA fellows as they were important tools in helping us achieve our objectives as a team. Important values that were useful in this task were grit, growth mindset and innovation. Our team was able to create something out of nothing with just a few weeks of collaboration and hard work.
We presented on pitch day and though not flawless I am proud of the work we were able to achieve as a team. This perhaps, is the beginning of our journey in agriculture.
I am grateful for my team who were an inspiration and support
Hard Skills Lab
This proved to be one of the more challenging and yet exciting parts of the innovation readiness program. Here we were asked to select a client project on our hard skill track (I chose the product management track) where we worked as Product Management consultants. My project Afya-Pamoja provides public healthcare managers and providers with actionable data and insights to improve patient outcomes.
One thing was clear from the start, the client was passionate about getting information that would guide the design and development teams in their quest to improving healthcare in Tanzania. Our early objectives were clear, review the cost and adoption drivers of deploying a digital survey tool for patients in Tanzania in order to guide decision making for a planned Q2 2021 pilot. This we did individually as PM’s giving feedback to the client in our weekly check-ins. In the last two weeks we hard to apply convergent thinking where all the PM’s assigned to the project had to come together and share notes on our individual research and compare in order to give the client a single coherent deliverable. We had to put on our collaborative hats, share references and reach a consensus recommendation to the client.
Once again, IFA values like grit, collaboration, growth mindset and inclusivity came in handy in order to complete the task at hand and we closed with a final presentation to the client. My team once again made the burden lighter and we truly learned from each other.
In closing, I would say my IFA journey has shown me that true innovation less about individual creativity or resolve but a collective effort to make things better, whether the beneficiaries of this good are an employer, an individual, a community or even a nation.
So, cheers to the beginning of tomorrow, as to get here we all had to lose ourselves to embrace our true innovative collective. The future couldn’t be more exciting!
