Innovation, entrepreneurship spaces Zimbabwe needs

26 Jan, 2018 - 00:01 0 Views

eBusiness Weekly

The past week was full of excitement and fascination due to the attendance of a Zimbabwean delegation to the World Economic Forum and the prospect of re-engaging with the rest of the world on the economy.

The President indicated in a session there that the nation of Zimbabwe is open for business, and specifically mentioned that small business is an area that will be reserved for locals.

This presents opportunity for any willing Zimbabwean, and indeed with the past decades of economic distress any new enterprise that offers value has a fair chance for success.

Access to the right support will accelerate the growth of small business and strengthen the ones that are already there.

There are various models of incubators and innovation spaces meant to promote entrepreneurship. What is critical is to determine the optimal model to achieve the economic development agenda in a specific geographical location.

A common mistake is the copy and paste approach, where promoters replicate the exact models that have worked in Europe, America or even other African countries; and wonder why they are not achieving the same effects or outcomes.

There is certainly room for learning from others, but the important thing would be to utilise only the aspects that work well in your environment. I have had opportunity to get insight into a couple of models over the past five years through visiting them and learning. The most common types of spaces are business incubation centres, co-working spaces, technology hubs, and maker-spaces. There are also hybrids of all the above.

Business incubators are institutions that deliberately seek to grow ideas to a point where they commercialise. It sounds rather simple and methodical but along that journey is a lot of hard work as we have outlined in the past articles.

Most are mixed use spaces that will seek out the best projects in various sectors, while some will specifically deal with specialised sectors, as do catering/kitchen incubators.

They typically run an in house pre-incubation program for totally new projects and/or an accelerator type program for start-ups that have some traction.

Clients admitted into these programs can get an assortment of linkages and benefits including training, funding, market linkages, co-founder capacity building for entrepreneurship and visibility through events. Many of the programmes will consciously or not incline towards Eric Ries’ Lean Start-up methodology, ensuring that selected/invited participants to their programmes can build a minimum viable product, test and validate it with potential customers, iterate or pivot entirely then bring it to scale.

They tend to seek to build an ecosystem around their charges and ensure they “graduate them” after the program contract ends, with an exit event where they pitch their ideas to attract partners for scale.

Typically they cannot admit more than a certain number of projects at a time. Some variations of these include those that may focus on only one aspect such as pitching, business skills training, funding; and of course informative social media. They also offer content and events that their general community can access. There are now a number of these programmes running in the nation since the rise of incubators from 2012.

Co-working spaces as the name goes are in the core business of letting out office space. They may have varying sizes of offices, and the more economic cubicle type — plus access to a boardroom, meeting room, training rooms and often shared access to services such as printing, copying, telephone and mailboxes/mail address, and of course kitchens, ablutions and the popular Wi-Fi!

Emphasis is on the facilities management, and the oversight of such a space is a tiring function all by itself with administration, collection, repairs, seeking and releasing tenants.

The housed businesses may not necessarily be related, but they can find mutual benefit through interaction at meet ups, if any — and if the tenants go out of their way to find out what other neighbouring enterprises do, synergies can be identified.

They tend to be excellent locations for community type meetings and hosting of major, periodic start-up events, in which case the co-working space becomes a gathering place for local entrepreneurs and innovators looking to network and learn in an unstructured environment.

Naturally, they anticipate revenue from rentals, and thus the bigger (and cooler) the space the better. Classic co-working should be more than just shared space; it should include collaborations between tenants.

Worldwide co-working is the future of property business as there is greater recognition of freelancers and online businesses that do not require large offices but just a place to work from.

They do very well to assist those transitioning from working from home to a more formal environment. Again, it is quite interesting to see that traditional property companies are beginning to appreciate this model and more such spaces are available in the cities.

Technology hubs tend to support the growth and development of ideas in the technology space. Many of them will look into assisting innovators developing applications and websites that offer solutions in various sectors: retail, health, education, agriculture, finance, corruption even.

Hackathons are a common gathering feature of these spaces, which can be an all-night or all day competition where different teams get themes and try to build online solutions to problems in the theme.

They will typically end with pitching the ideas and their functionality to a panel of experts and/or funders; usually with some cash and/or gadget prizes. (Unfortunately, many times prizes become an end in itself). Tech hubs take various forms and shapes around the world, where they include biotechnologies, with some inclining towards being testing centres for mobile solutions and others more like digital learning centres. Often they will provide space for the start-ups/students to operate from with the hope that they can benefit from collaboration and critical mass in engaging partners or other resources.

Often these are run by a hub/community manager together with in-house technology experts, and may generate income from consulting work, research and creating apps on order, amongst other things. Some have a purely social contribution agenda; using technology for development, and leveraging it to solve difficult and important problems.

We hardly have these in Zimbabwe and there is certainly opportunity to build spaces that focus on artificial intelligence, big data and build solutions based on the block-chain; rather than just building websites and applications.

Maker-spaces are yet another type of innovation space — where participants gather in a workshop environment and deal with tangible stuff, tearing apart and building functional things. This speaks to hardware innovations like 3D printing that allows participants to create useful things like prosthetic limbs and the software side of robotics where they use code to give commands allowing the hardware to work.

Our people already do a lot of informal making particularly in steel and wood and this just needs to be buffeted with a layer of training to create appropriate technologies for our agriculture sector for example.

Learning is starting early with a few programs that engage primary school students giving them confidence to build and make things, working comfortably with electronics, robots and 3D printers. These types of spaces are brilliant for inspiring and supporting inventors amongst us, and ensuring we are creators of solutions.

Locations of all these spaces can be anywhere — garages, homes, local authority buildings, commercial properties, churches, universities and other learning institutions and any physical gathering places in communities — while some will be virtual, interacting with a large entrepreneurial community online, with occasional periodic offline engagement. In summary, any community can run an innovation space shaped by the core economic activities that drive it. We shall start to delve deeper into the opportunities for small business in these sectors.

Feedback: Twitter @kumub, Email [email protected]

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