Innovating For Africa - A budding entrepreneurs experience.

In the past 1 month, I have devoted my self to the Innovate For Africa (IFA) innovation readiness program that’s aimed at equipping young talented aspiring entrepreneurs with practical hard and soft skills that match the energy required for start ups. The aim of this is to provide hands on experience to continue the innovation ecosystem. I can say that I have had the experience of a lifetime learning to be a young innovator. Everyday, we were taught how to embody the IFA values of grit, collaboration, innovation, growth mindset and inclusivity.

At the start of each day, we got a classwork script that outlined our tasks for the day and how to achieve them. Recommended articles, videos or books were also included to give us even better clarity. I really liked this as it made it easy to get a task done even working alone.

The IFA team was encouraging daily. They understood how new this was to many of us and were there guiding us.

Another key aspect of this training was the collaboration between fellows. It was wonderful to see every day how other fellows came to the aid of one who was struggling or confused. Sometimes, we would have people share information and tips that made a task easy to achieve. When we worked on our group projects, even when there were disagreements, we came back to encourage and present good work.

Here’s a brief detail of what the curricula entailed.

Personal Branding; For the first 2 weeks of this training, we spent time every morning working on presenting ourselves in a professional way through our resumes and portfolios. I finally learnt how to create a resume that was professional and yet captured everything important. It was tasking but fun working on a portfolio using Wix. It forced me to think about projects I had done and how it was executed.

Guest Speakers; Throughout the course of the training, we had successful entrepreneurs who spoke to us. There was a pattern I noticed, how each of them had persevered through challenges, they were unafraid to pursue a dream or vision that they had. I was encouraged that though the road is rough, it is important to persevere and stay on course. One of my personal favorite speakers was Mrs Faith Adesemowo, co-founder of CEO. She has been able to address a real life social problem in the society while also making strides in the hair styling industry, a field I am particularly interested in.

Design Thinking; here I learnt how to be user centric when recognizing a problem as well as creating a solution. We spent over 2 weeks working on a hackathon as a group to identify a problem in the society and come up with solutions that were user centric.

We worked using the design thinking process of empathize, define, ideate, prototyping and testing;

Strategic Analysis; The lessons under this put into perspective how to properly assess a company before going for an interview. I had always done research before interviewing for a company but never in an organized manner. Now I know how to do an organizational framework.

Hard Skills Lab; This had to be the most challenging part of the training but I would also describe it as the most rewarding. For this, we had to work as a product manager solving a real problem for a company. This was entirely new to me and quite frustrating at the start. I was tasked with providing a roommate matching solution for SplitSpot, an apartment renting company in the USA. To help make it easier, IFA assigned us mentors who were industry experts. My mentor Mr Quadri Oguntade was kind and encouraging. We were also provided with reading materials for every week to guide us through a step by step process of being a product manager. By the last week, I had learnt how to conduct a primary market research, draw up a product roadmap, experiment with prototyping tools and finally collaborate with a team to make a product requirements document detailing this task. Here's a link to this

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1KgmU4_P6m1hbna5SjZsTGs4XyiiLydmD&authuser=0

At the end of this training, I have learnt some key things;

- There is nothing that I cannot learn how to do. This experience was new and I struggled especially with the hard skills lab but at the end of our final presentations, I was reminded yet again that I can achieve anything I decide to.

- There is reward in perseverance. Pushing through this program and then seeing the reward at the end got me thrilled. It was good to see that my grit had yielded good fruit.

- Collaboration never grows old. It is great to achieve things on your own but to collaborate is to open the doors for even more.

I am thankful to the IFA team for this experience, I believe I am well on my way to being an innovator for change.