Archive for the ‘Emerging Markets’ Category
Isn’t East Africa Social Enough Yet?
The CIO East Africa ‘Year Ahead’ forum in Nairobi was held yesterday at the Fairmont Norfolk Hotel and local SAP executives, government representatives and local enterpreneur spoke about their predictions for 2011. There were a few surprises and disappointments at the forum. I’ll pick just two.
TweetInnovating with Meaning: What’s The Incentive?
It’s really easy to spot innovation sometimes because it fits our pre-conceived notions of what innovation looks like. But innovation can sometimes be spotted in the pedestrian things of life. I use the term ‘innovate with meaning’ a lot and it can seem abstract to some. It simply means “to bring a sense of significance or meaning to peoples’ lives through innovation“. That’s my definition.
TweetOur Predictions for 2011
We left this till pretty late but here it is nonetheless; our predictions for which five trends will be big in East Africa this year. Of course we are focusing on social business and innovation for the BoP so there’s no mention of how the referendum in Southern Sudan is going to go 🙂 Enough with the small talk, here we go:
TweetThe Open Innovation Africa Summit 2010
The view from part of the Great Rift Valley Lodge
About 200 people from more than 24 countries converged on the Great Rift Valley Lodge for Open Innovation Africa Summit 2010. Organized by Nokia, infoDev and Cap Gemini it was three days of conversation, brainwriting (heard that one for the first time there) and consultations on four topics of importance to the continent. The summit followed the Accelerated Solutions Environment format owned by Cap Gemini.
The summit was organized along four streams and by the end of the three days, each stream had solid ideas on what the way forward would look like. You can see the four streams better explained here. In summary, they were;
- African Innovation Ecosystem
- Sustainability models for Base of the Pyramid
- The Mobile Information Society
- Human Capital – Education for All
Day 2 Plenary Session at OIAS 2010
I spent the two of the three days in the sustainability models for the base of the pyramid where lively conversations happened on co-creation models, incubators, a business model for educational gaming and crowd-sourcing. Hopefully, the Nokia/infoDev/CapGemini team will post the material generated and outcome summaries for the event sometime in the next few weeks.
As an outcome from the summit, we at Semacraft will be spending considerable time in the near future facilitating discussions around business model innovation and identifying other areas small or large enterprises can innovate in to deliver with success in the BoP. Follow us on Twitter (@semacraft) or subscribe to our RSS feeds for updates on the next workshops on BoP innovation.
You can see some reactions from the summit on the Techweez blog here and by Kachwanya here.
TweetImproving Adoption of Innovation in Emerging Markets.
In a previous post, we looked at the role of social proof in moving innovations from early adopters to the majority at the base of the pyramid. This is a follow-up to that post.
In the West, as in the East, word of mouth can make or break a business. In markets where traditional media is absent or penetration and access to data on products or services is minimal (or absent), word of mouth is the ONLY way for a brand to be known. How can brands use word of mouth to help their innovations cross the chasm?
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