[Register] Innovation for Growth Workshop, Lagos – Sept 2018

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May 14, 2018

Webmaster Note (N.U): This event has sold out. Please contact us for a new workshop we plan to run in Lagos.

The ITNews Africa, a South African publisher, has called me a “doctor of innovation”. As they were creating a new product – the “African Innovator Magazine” – they knocked at my door. The London-based Planet Earth Institute, a non-profit chaired by a former UK Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has recognized me as an “African science and technology pioneer”. From TED fellowship to the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader, through my doctoral degrees and master’s degrees, to my works on iPhone sensors, innovation has been my only strategy. I teach innovation, from South Africa to Vietnam, from Kenya to United States, and beyond. And on the pages of Harvard Business Review, I have been writing on innovation for years. And I live innovation in my businesses and we have won awards because we delight customers.

This September, I will bring an innovation workshop to Nigeria. I always come to Nigeria to lead programs for banks, insurers, technology companies, governments and more. The cost is above industry pricing, making it very hard for some firms to afford to host me solely.

To solve that, I am going to run an open [anyone can pay and attend] workshop for three days in September. The cost is N800,000 ($2,300) per participant. The venue would be Lagos.

State of the Tech Nation – This address will discuss Technology, Opportunities & Unlocking Wealth in Nigeria

Workshop Structure

To innovate is to set a new basis of competition in an economy, business sector or market. Typically, it results to disruption. This workshop will focus on innovation and growth because growth is the reward of innovation. Otherwise, that innovation is actually an invention. I will be the lead instructor with my supporting crew. The table below provides the workshop structure.

Day 1 – Innovation Discovery	Day 2- Innovation Exploration	Day 3- Innovation Design and Applications
The State of Nigerian markets	State of the Tech Nation address	Becoming a Digital Innovator
Mapping internal & external trends	Innovation Translation	Filtering & modelling [Business & Functional Vision]
Digital Innovation frameworks	Emerging Technologies	Labs with Innovation Roadmap Brief
Business Challenges	Teamwork / Disruptive thinking	Takeoff Vision & Frontiers (see video)
Enablers and Creativity tools	The Category-Kings Benchmarking [Local & International]	Innovation Execution

Who should attend?

The workshop is designed for mid and senior leadership teams. These include CEOs, VPs, directors, technology, sales, marketing, strategy and finance leads in all business sectors. The workshop is aimed at:

Companies looking for new growth areas and products
Companies with potential, ambition and capacity for high growth
New company owners, founders and entreprenuers who want to build robust businesses.
Existing companies who want to engineer innovation within existing enterprises
Startups and their leaders who need directions on roadmaps and strategies
Governments and policy makers working to stimulate innovations

How to Register

There are two ways to register – either method works for us.

Make a payment of N800,000 to any of our bank accounts here [you can also use Interswicth and GTPay, though you can just make the transfer to our bank directly]. Once you make payment, email the contact below.
Make payment via Paypal using our FASMICRO U.S.A. merchant account for $2,300. Once you do, contact the email below. Use this link here to process the payment via Paypal.

Before the Program [Your Innovation Roadmap Brief]

Once you make payment, my team would reach out. We would need at least a two-page document frOm you, explaining your business (or function) and the challenges you are having or what you expect. Using the insight, we would develop an Innovation Roadmap Brief which will be sent to you before the program starts. That document would form a part of your Lab during the workshop. Our workshop ensures we look into your business (or functional role) and you leave our program with clarity on execution.

Venue

This event will take place in Lagos (Nigeria), September 2018, in a leading hotel. We would share with registered participants.

Expected Outcome

My goal is that after this workshop, you would have a clear roadmap to execute innovation at a company-wide or functional level. My workshops are intense, practical and interactive with local cases flavored with international examples, making sure you are global-aware even as you plot a gloCal strategy (see my Harvard piece on this]. I will focus on the growth of your business (or your functional role), and I expect you to return to work with clarity on how to make innovation happen at scale.

First Come, First Serve

We have limited space. Once we reach capacity, we would stop accepting participants. So, register immediately. You can also inform my team via email to reserve space immediately while you seek approval for payment [they typically give a time frame for that].

About Prof Ndubuisi Ekekwe, PhD

Please read about me here.

Refund Policy

We would refund you 100% of your payment up to 24 hours before the program starts.

Discounts

We offer discounts for multiple registrations. Please contact team via email below.

Questions

Please email tekedia@fasmicro.com. My team would follow up. We hope to meet you in Lagos.

2018 Workshop Payment – $2300

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Tekedia Editors

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May 14, 2018

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Cellulant Raises $47.5M to Battle Paystack, Flutterwave, others on Digital Payments

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Ndubuisi Ekekwe

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May 14, 2018

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The most exciting space in Africa to raise money at the moment is in fintech. Agtech (agricultural technology) comes second but the separation is huge. Fintech is raising money because Africa is still largely a cash-based economy, as I noted yesterday. Investors understand that the future is going to be digital, and they are pumping money into startups working to digitize African payments. Despite what we have done so far, about 98% of all consumer-to business-transactions are still cash-based in Nigeria.

According to research done by The Fletcher School and MasterCard, of the $301 billion of funds flow from consumers to businesses in Nigeria, 98 percent is still based on cash.

Yet, most firms are focusing too much on “clicks” neglecting “bricks”. If 98% of your revenue is coming from bricks today, you cannot neglect the physical. Do not listen to them when they say that today is mobile and online. Sure, the future promises mobile and online, but we have to survive today.

Do not be intimidated with the alarms on online disruption: the glory on the clicks is a promise. But “bricks” is on our hands. You are investing too much for clicks and your management is focusing largely exclusively on clicks. No one cares about the bricks. Unfortunately, the “bricks” customers are noticing. They are not happy in your stores.

So, digital payment companies have 98% of opportunities ahead to be tapped. If they can move from 2% digital payment penetration to 50% of the $301 billion, they would be earning about $4.5 billion on fees if the average commission is 3%. This explains why you are seeing foreign and local investors throwing cash on fintech companies with specific focus on payments. Yes, those companies include Paystack, Flutterwave, and just few hours ago Cellulant. Cellulant raised $47.5 million from TPG Growth fund (along with others).

The Rise Fund owned by private equity firm TPG Growth, led a $47.5 million investment in Cellulant, an African digital payments provider with operations in Kenya and Nigeria.

The deal which includes Endeavour Catalyst and Satya Capital and was announced on Monday, 14 May, is the first of its kind in Africa not just for the firm but it is the largest involving a fintech company that does business in Africa. The last time a fintech company received equity investment exceeding two digits was in 2017 when Flutterwave secured over $10 million.

“This accelerates the company’s goal of becoming the number one digital payments and financial services provider,” Bolaji Akinboro, co-founder of Cellulant and CEO of Cellulant Nigeria said on Twitter on Monday morning.

Cellulant was established in 2004 by Ken Njoroge (Kenyan) and Bolaji Akinboro. Initially, the founders focused the company in providing music and news content on mobile to consumers in Kenya and Nigeria. The company began to diversify into mobile money services in 2005. It was awarded a mobile payment license by the Central Bank of Nigerian in 2014 which helped to facilitate its partnership with the Nigerian government to supply fertiliser to farmers using a mobile wallet scheme.

Cellulant has operations in 11 countries including Ghana, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Liberia, Malawi, Botswana, and Mozambique, with 94 banks and seven mobile money platforms that have a combined potential customer base of 130 million

This is just a starting point – the startups would need multiples of these amounts to scratch the sector. The challenge is really that they would have to build the foundation infrastructure since government has not provided most basic amenities. Think of offering merchant digital payments when there is no electricity and connectivity. And that is also why what they are doing is exciting: if they build these systems now, they could lockup the opportunities if everything runs on their pipelines. There is no doubt – fintech would offer Africa the first major exit in the startup world.

Building an Exponential Organisation

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Guest Author

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May 14, 2018

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by Mehmood Khan, Chief Operating Officer at SAP Africa

The term ‘exponential organisation’ was first introduced in a 2014 book by the Singularity University founding director Salim Ismail and co-authors Michael Malone and Yuri van Geest. An exponential organisation is one governed by an assumption of abundance, where the typical constraints of linear organisations – for example, building more offices in new locations and equipping them with the requisite staff and facilities – are bypassed through clever use of technology that enables low organisational demands.

Airbnb is a typical exponential organisation: instead of establishing new locations for guest houses and hotels, building and equipping those locations, maintaining the properties, and sourcing and retaining staff, Airbnb accumulates listings around the world without incurring the capital expenditure to which most hotel groups are subject, leveraging technology to deliver a seamless and enjoyable customer experience that is often largely self-governable.

The DNA of exponential organisations

What nearly all exponential organisations have in common is a digitised supply chain that enables rapid scaling and frictionless customer experiences, often across global markets. They make use of technological innovations to compete on even footing with even the largest organisations, and then leverage an abundance mindset to move faster and more effectively than their bigger competitors.

Essentially, an exponential organisation is structured in such a way that they are able to fully realise the benefits of the digital economy. And within this, the COO plays a critical, often unseen role in ensuring the organisational building blocks are in place to enable the realisation of the exponential organisation.

In an EY study, half of the global COOs polled were closely engaged in discussing the role that operations can play in business transformation, with 57% seeing this as a fundamental part of creating organisational value. This is key to shifting the role of the COO from a largely operational one to a more strategic one.

The COO balancing act

Since the COO controls how organisational resources are allocated and prioritised, he or she must ensure that such resources are in the right place at the right time to enable the effective execution of exponential organisational strategy. However, in the same EY study, only half of COOs polled had identified opportunities to get operations involved with strategic decision-making. This creates a dilemma for the COO: their function within the organisation demands a firm focus on current demands, while their longer-term and arguably greater impact rests firmly in the future.

Technology has a critical role to play in enabling the COO to execute on broader strategy initiatives that can take a linear organisation – one focused on exploiting vertical market dominance – to an exponential one. Predictive analytics, for example, can combine sensor-based data with machine learning and AI capability to equip COOs with live insights into the current performance of the digitised supply chain. This frees up some of the COO’s time to focus on the more high-yield strategic initiatives that will ensure the organisation’s long-term competitiveness and sustainability.

A to-do list for the exponential COO

A recent IDC infographic pointed to the top five business priorities for executives right now, including reducing external supplier costs, outperforming the competition, improving security (necessitated by increased connectivity), regulatory compliance, and improved customer service. However, the priorities are going to shift greatly over the next few years, with one key priority falling straight in the ambit of the COO: improving adaptability and flexibility of the supply chain.

The fundamental role of the traditional COO is to ensure that operations quality, efficiency and customer services are improved and optimised through their interventions. In a digital economy, I would argue there is a new dimension fundamental to the effective functioning of the COO: removing friction within the organisational value chain by effecting a digital supply chain. Customer demands for personalised service and individualised products means organisations need to be highly responsive to individual needs and desires. The growing complexity of doing business also requires technological intervention to ensure COOs are not left treading water, endlessly dealing with current problems and challenges and losing sight of the longer-term strategic value that will elevate the business.

COOs can start laying the foundation of a future exponential organisation now by focusing on five key actions, namely:

1. Improved customer centricity;

2. Investment in smart automation;

3. Enabling predictive business decision-making;

4. Ensuring total visibility across all lines-of-business; and

5. Leveraging a digital innovation platform powered by IoT, blockchain, AI, machine learning and analytics, to enable secure process automation, better decision-making, and faster and more accurate responses to customer demands.

Building an Efficient Credit Scoring System in Nigeria

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Ndubuisi Ekekwe

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May 13, 2018

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Nigeria runs on cash. For many years, the government has been working hard to make it credit-based. The Cashless Policy which encourages electronic transactions and the BVN (Bank Verification Number) policy which links biometrics with bank account numbers are some initiatives government has used to drive this redesign [electronic transactions have records which can be used to anchor credit-based systems]. Through Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS), the financial institution can build a good chart of any Nigerian banking customer through its BVN. When you add NIMC (National Identity Management Commission) Identity Number to it, you have a new dawn.

Yet, it is possible that the new dawn will come from fintech, not necessarily banking institutions, because the BVN is not open, with no structure at the moment to anchor any service beyond validating account ownership. The fintechs have to use alternative means to drive this new age in the economy.

The State of the Ecosystem

In a copyright-free piece in APO newsletter, Oradian made this observation which I have adapted.

More than 2.5 billion people around the world – many of them in Africa – lack formal identification that enables them to access financial and government services, according to the United Nations and the ID2020 project. What’s more, less than 10% of adults in low and middle-income countries are on file in public credit registries.

The result is that millions of people in Africa are paying punitive interest rates for credit or are frozen out of access to financial services. Microfinance institutions (MFIs) in the region charge their borrowers notoriously high interest rates, often up to 30% per year. This is partly because these lenders face a higher risk of loan defaults than mainstream banks due to a lack of borrower data to support lending decisions.

MFIs in frontier markets have traditionally needed to make lending decisions without access to the sort of customer data and documentation commercial banks take for granted: credit scores, identification documents such as passports or government ID cards, bank statements, lending history and collateral.

Fintech providers, financial inclusion companies and digital finance applications are filling this information gap with alternative credit data. Credit scoring applications collect masses of data about phone owners and use these data points to produce accurate credit scores.

This alternative credit data could help the credit officers at microfinance banks (MFBs) and MFIs who make lending decisions to make more accurate predictions about loan performance. This could, in turn, help improve collection rates and profitability for institutions and make credit more affordable for lower-risk customers.

With smartphone ownership in Africa rising as the average selling price falls, an unprecedented amount of credit data is expected to become available in the years to come.

This is certainly a huge opportunity when combined with BVN in Nigeria.

Building Effective System

While it is vital to innovate, it is also important that Nigeria makes sure that the privacy and security of citizens’ data are protected by all the players in the credit scoring business. I have noted how such a system can be built in the nation.

The alignment of the interests of the banks, credit bureaus and citizens will be catalytic in establishing a functioning credit ecosystem in Nigeria. This is not included in the current CBN’s guidelines for establishing credit bureaus in Nigeria. We cannot do it the way the Americans have done it. We need a system that provides a citizen element so that credit bureaus have clear incentives to deliver good services. You cannot be selling people’s data and yet have no incentives to serve the people and protect their data. With this proposed model, the oligopolistic system that runs in the credit bureau industry will be dismantled in the Nigerian model. The outcome will be a virtuoso credit bureau system that secures customers data as it serves its core customers, the banks.