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Nigeria University System Needs Changes – We Need Innovative Education

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Guest Author
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I have not schooled in the Ivy League, yet I am fascinated by their successes.  I am moved to draw lesson from these institutions that have stood decades and are known for building people who are self reliant and would dare the unimaginable.

 

For us, our educational system is fraught will many problems from finance, pedagogy, personnel and structural design. Yet several summit and state of emergency have been declared with no tangible result. The successes of the private sector Universities have again proved the private sector as a better manager of resources and enterprise. They have building institutions that will increase our growth potentials as a nation. Despite these, I am worried at the entrepreneurial personalities of their products.

 

Can we rely on them to help build a new crop of self-dependent people, who will not look up for some jobs? Would their bourgeoisie background not deny them the courage exemplified by Bill Gates III?  Would they associate with the social reality of our environments or import ideas and concepts alien to the reality on ground?

 

The urgent task before the administrator of these private university is to steer the way as Frederick Terman had done in Stanford. Our premier Federal universities could not lead us to this status, though they provided the leadership which have led the nation this far. With knowledge economy as the way to go, we need a new crop of personalities raised to lead our nation through new sustainable enterprise.

 

The Federal Government through Ministry of Education and National Universities Commission   has rightly gone further in instituting the establishment of Entrepreneurship Study Centers (ESCs). Yet, that alone will not produce the result desired, if the lecturers are not entrepreneurial by nature or learn to be. For a start, our patent- R&D relationship is dismal, a reflection of the outputs of the lecturers who are to show the undergraduate the way to building entreprise.

 

The nation needs to embrace collaboration amongst all relevant MDAs to work at getting our universities to be the hotbeds of innovation. If DAPRA, NASA,  US  Food and Safety Agency  etc will work with US Higher Educational Institutions in improving their economic competitiveness. It is appropriate we take advantage of the limited competing resources in all our MDAs and HEIs to work at resolving our problems through enterprise building.

 

This post was contributed by Bola who runs the Innovation blog.

MainOne Offers a Roadmap for National Policy on Broadband

By
Tekedia Editors
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This is an adapted  press release from MainOne on their advocacy for formulation of a national policy on broadband.

According to the Chief Executive Officer of Main One Cable Company, Funke Opeke, a national broadband policy will establish the strategic framework for the industry operators and stakeholders. “We think that with increasing demand for broadband accessibility by Nigerians, the time has come for the government and key players in the sector to articulate and develop a policy framework which regulates broadband service delivery and lays out a pragmatic roadmap on how we can get the capacity which is now available across the shoreline to the hinterlands”, she said.

Ms. Opeke stated further that there are some key issues impeding broadband penetration which should form the thrust of the national broadband policy. “We have identified issues such as a review of the national backbone, network availability, access and interconnection. In addition, NCC needs to look at matters of spectrum, frequency and distribution and try to review how they are allocated and utilized to improve telecommunications in the country”, she added.

Reviewing Main One’s performance in the last one year following its successful commencement of operations in July, 2010, Ms. Opeke said the company was proud to be West Africa’s first wholesale broadband company and driving the broadband revolution across the sub region. According to her, “Main One has transformed the telecommunication landscape of Nigeria and West Africa. We have done a great job of maintaining an extremely reliable network; a network which has remained 100% available to our customers since we launched a year ago”.

She said Main One’s has created footprints on the telecommunications industry and will continue to do its best to satisfy the yearnings of its customers. “We brought a big cable with a lot of capacity to the market which has seen a reduction in price points. We have seen call rates drop, internet costs reduced while access to broadband and speed has increased. This is part of the impact we have created as we continue to develop the broadband market”, she added.

Ms. Opeke also said Main One places a high premium on service quality. According to her, Main One signed partnership agreements with Cisco, Seacom, Global Crossing among others in its quest to ensure that the customers enjoy access to quality telecommunication at cheaper rates. She said Main One is focused on finding ways to service the majority of the population still yearning for more broadband, higher speed and low prices. The company, she said, is pursuing this with emphasis on another landing point in the South South region of Nigeria as well as extending its cables to other countries down the West African coast.

It would be recalled that Main One Cable, in July, 2010,  commenced broadband operations in Nigeria and Ghana following the successful completion of its multimillion dollar undersea fibre cables from Portugal down to the West coast of Africa.

VDT Communications Is a Leader in Complete Turnkey Solutions in Data Communications

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Tekedia Editors
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VDT Communications provides a complete, turnkey solution to data communication needs. As an offshoot of BITCOM systems Ltd,  with 15 years experience in the design, installation, and maintenance of all types of data network engineering solutions, the company innovates for the good of the customer.

 

VDT Communications provides a complete, turnkey solution to all of your data communication needs. VDT Communications comes with a 15 years track record in the design, installation, and maintenance of all types of data network engineering solutions is put at the advantage of our customers.

 

The firm drives network transformation for enterprises and service providers through communications technologies that increase productivity and open new sources of revenues.
As a mission they set to provide a reliable, end-to-end source for telecom services with a broad product suite backed by trustworthy, dependable customer service.

 

 

VDT’s cheapest broadband data and internet solutions are fast, secure, and reliable for many critical applications including electronic commerce, E-mail, remote access, and convergent voice and data services.

 

This is a continuation of our series: know the solution providers

Do Not Be Deceived , The Era of Low Unemployment Is Gone in Western Nations, at Least for Next Decade.

By
Tekedia Editors
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The  world is undergoing a transformation that is breaking social systems from United States to Nigeria. Mortgage crises, euro-region debt burdens and series of other problems have seriously affected many key financial districts around the world. Everything has changed and the capacity of capitalism to sustain human progress has been put to test.

 

The world has a new normal: economic uncertainties. America with all their top elite universities seems not to have a roadmap on how to navigate out of the valley of spiraling economic difficulties. In this convoluted world with high level of interconnectivity, one economic problem leads to another. Nothing seems to be working in fixing the economy.

 

The global unemployment rate is rising and what used to be the problem of the developing world is creeping into the advanced nations. Unfortunately, the rate is not going down anytime soon. Why? The future of industry is not designed for a majority human workforce. Rather, a byte and bit workforce. Websites, powered by supercomputers, will continue to compete with humans.

 

As technology penetrates, we will continue to experience displacement across all the key industrial sectors. We have already phased out the industry that hires special secretaries to work the typewriting machines. The ticket masters have been replaced by websites. Increasingly, websites are offering professional counseling from finance to romance that humans used to do. A new generation of smartphones will displace the language interpreters, when we have language translators inbuilt in our phones. Today, an engineer equipped with computer aided design tools will do better than ten engineers a century ago.

 

In nearly all industries, technology is enabling firms to do more with lesser human power. Human productivity has consistently improved over the centuries and our standards of livings have correlated with it. However, while the industrial age technologies made sense of the factors of production of labor and land, the new age calls for knowledge.  Through robotics and automation, hundreds of man-hours can be replaced with a simple machine that never asks for benefits.

 

So, unlike the industrial economy, having more startups may not translate to more jobs, because in most cases those startups create technologies that eliminate more human jobs across the industries. This seems to be at odds with nearly every major economic roadmap from academia to governments (I stand by it).

 

Specifically, for every one person that is hired in most Internet startups, 2 jobs are lost across all sectors (my numbers). When ten parents decide to use a website to help their kids improve their mathematics skills, part-time teachers are displaced. When a big bank opens a web portal that enables customers to make informed decisions, financial planners will be cut. In general, who needs a stock picker, when most websites offer quality analyses free? Our society is changing, and people and firms must give things free to compete. That is why websites that require subscriptions are seldom popular.

 

This is a global redesign and it is very important that policymakers understand that what worked in 1960 may not necessarily work now. Information is moving fast and the reaction of the consumer is spontaneous. They are being rewired through online communal ties resulting to new patterns of lifestyles.

 

Nevertheless, what we are seeing today is just the beginning. The future of the world is one where many people will be unemployed. We will continue to innovate, however, that will not create enough jobs to change the trajectory of global unemployment rate.

 

The biggest crisis is coming. It will come in 2022 when nanotechnology would have matured from lab to the market. First, it will help displace millions of cotton, rubber and agricultural workers across the globe when engineers can make these devices in the lab. They can hire fifty people to produce the same quantity of cotton one million people used to produce in Sudan.  They will displace those workers and clusters of wars will take place across the developing world.

 

There would be unprecedented cycles of revolutions as unemployment increases. Commodity market will morph into technology market and millions will lose heritage and culture because human innovation has disrupted them. I have called this the ‘war of nano’.

 

As we indulge and celebrate the innovations we witness everyday in technology, it is important to note that nothing like this has ever existed. A man can become a media company, without a distribution network and the delivery men. A company can exist entirely on Internet, cutting off all the real estate professionals.  A bank that used to employ 5000 staff could use 600 people because it has modernized its infrastructure.  Technology is competing with us and we are losing the battle.

 

Yet, most governments seem not to understand what is going on. When you continue to measure the characteristics of the knowledge economy with the tools of the industrial economy, the world cannot be governed right.  Pushing government funds to create startups and new companies in the hope of reducing unemployment could be fallacious. This is not an industrial age new companies that hire in legions. The best companies work to eliminate head counts with the powers of microprocessors.  From US to UK, human productivity due to technology has accelerated faster than job creation and the old labor equilibrium distorted.

 

It is an illusion to think that any government policy will change the structure of labor in the long-term since daily we are encroaching into new territories with new technologies. The launch of Google created millionaires, but also crushed many industries. Sure, it created new industries, but those employ fewer workers, in average.  It looks so evident that the cinema, bookstores and all those traditional networks that employ humans will be completely replaced with websites in the near future. Unfortunately, the business model of internet is knowledge-based, requiring few skilled workers. Unlike the factory model, it takes just a few to run those companies.

 

The world needs to understand that increased productivity and technology penetration will change our labor model, forever. Now is the time to begin that process of designing systems to manage a society where many will be unemployed.  We must change the way students are trained and educated.

 

Our present education model is job-centric: the brightest students expect to be hired. That is why most companies are not created by the valedictorians and best students, but middle of the pack who struggle sometimes to get good jobs. The former gets accelerated corporate infusion and they rarely have to create new firms. With getting job in mind, our education loses the very purpose of education-the liberation of the mind. Until we change that paradigm to enable students get mental and entrepreneurial readiness, many will be unemployed. The truth is that anyone with skills, in anything, has a big market to succeed today than ever. Focusing on that element of personal discovery will help students prepare to graduate in a society of fewer jobs and prosper.

 

Finally, governments must modernize those industrial age tools they use to track unemployment. There are thousands across the developed world that make decent livings on web ventures, yet are classified unemployed because no one has developed the right tools to capture the ‘informal Internet labor’. Technology makes it possible for people to build personal wealth in Beijing while living in San Francisco, technically classified unemployed.  This supports my notion that lack of quality data is affecting government ability to develop a strategy to reduce unemployment since most of the ‘unemployed’ people are working. That technology that displaces jobs through higher productivity can also help improve government statistics.

To Innovate, Follow No One – Make a New Path And Avoid Herding

By
Tekedia Editors
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Innovation lives in Africa

As a young banker in Lagos, I wrote a report that one of the reasons responsible for collapse of many small businesses in eastern Nigeria was communal mutual poverty. I have observed that many of the entrepreneurs started well, but as soon as they become fairly successful, family and extended family system would cripple them. As more people depend on their supports, they would eat into their capitals and will eventually collapse.

It happens very often as most of the men, unemployed in many villages, have managed growth companies at one time in their lives. They were sent by their parents for apprenticeships in the cities and after serving their masters, they were assisted to start their own companies.  As soon as they begin, the communal power of African family system will come upon them.

More family members will move to their houses and unintentional activities that will destroy their businesses and eventually bring them back to poverty accelerated. It seems that you cannot have these rich men in a system where many are poor. They are dragged down into communal mutual poverty until the day the businesses collapse and they return poor to the village.

I concluded that report by noting that entrepreneurs from stable and supporting families succeed in average over those whose families would depend on them disproportionally. My motivation was to help banks understand the risk profiles of business loan applicants.

 

The same analogy above applies in many modern industries. Companies increasingly congregate in their competitive strategies. They tend to do similar things in order to self preserve themselves. In the era of Yahoo, AOL and getting a casino app on your mobile phone installed in 10 seconds, they provided similar services. Cell phone companies provide services and pricing models that are largely the same.

Even the network televisions are not spared this effect.  From casinos to airline industry, we can see an ordered communality across industries. They mutually agreed, though never admitting it, to move in features, services and prices alike. The airline industry was notorious for it about fifteen years ago. In most developing markets where Internet has not penetrated, the media empires move in tandem on their stories, prices and distribution networks.

I call this communal mutual competitive strategy because it simply means that these firms in their respective industries form communal ties and agree to provide services that will preserve them with lesser disruption to their industries. Many have called this win-win strategy. It has also been seen as coopetition where, especially in banks, they cooperate though competing against each other in other to keep the industry healthy.

Unfortunately, just as communal mutual poverty ends up badly; communal mutual competitive strategy (CMCS) is doomed in this age. The 21st century is not the one where industries can drive the consumers. Technology disrupts our needs a lot faster and makes it possible that trends arrive and fade quicker. This is in line with my argument that focusing on customer needs is a recipe for disaster; rather, firms must focus on meeting the perception of customers.  That means going to offer services and products you envision they need and not asking at the moment. The idea is that very soon, the trends will make them to need them. It is like developing iPod or iPhone when few thought they were unnecessary, but when they arrived, we all liked them.

As social media, technology and globalization make consumers more informed, firms must resist the urge to follow competitors into CMCS. I understand how difficult it would be to be unique or possibly a loner when something is working for everyone in the industry, and someone is asking you to follow a different plan. Banks destroyed their industry when most of the big ones got into subprime mortgage loans. In most cases, the defense from these banks was making those loans was an industry norm.

The old Ford Motors, Chrysler and GM followed a pattern- making big gas-hungry vehicles. They were all herding one another and the competition was defined on pushing more SUVs in the market. The 360-degree understanding of your market and the need of seeing the perception of consumers based on the environments which included climate movement, oil price projections and other factors played minor roles in their strategies. They were happy to communally compete, it was working, and none was ready to become a loner, even when data proved the necessity.

So what must firms do to avoid the trap of CMCS? They must move away from the competitive mutuality, where necessary. Google disrupted the industry when it emerged because Yahoo, MSN and AOL were basically doing the same. I recalled that the highest email storage one could get those days was 8MG; Google provided 1GB. In airline industry, we have seen Raynair and other budget carriers in Europe disrupted the industry by offering competitive prices and taking market shares from the national carriers.  We all know what happened to the US big auto companies when the Asia companies built models that appealed to customers.

In summary, I am not saying that competitive herding is totally bad. However, if an organization relies on that it will not survive for long. Most new entrants usually focus on attacking those models and when they do, you will be affected.  This means you must have a strategy that is different from your competitors. You have to become like McDonald that invested in Chipotle Mexican Grill.  While the model of Big Mac was under attack by policies, they covered themselves with Chipotle. Similarly, Pepsi has since evolved as purely a soda firm. If you focus on attacking the soda business, you will not get Pepsi. They got out of the soda war with Coca Cola and reinvented.

Avoid the CMCS trap and when everyone in the competition is giving customers more, you may go sole and refuse to give. And in cases where they are taking, give the customers more. Herding with your competitors is not a guarantee that you will survive. It simply means that your industry is vulnerable because your singular model can easily be attached by an outsider.

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