Innovate for Africa (IFA) is a program that trains young aspiring entrepreneurs and innovators though an innovation readiness program and then mentored by a team educated in Harvard and MIT. It is a 4-week of in-depth training on skills and innovative thinking necessary to meet the 21st century workplace and ever evolving innovative system.
I was privileged to be selected for the program as one of the fellows and I must say, it was one 4 weeks that made a life impact on me. It exposed me to a lot of aspects I thought I couldn’t venture into. It helped me push my boundaries and expand my thinking horizon. It helped me know that for every problem, there exist innovative and smart solutions to it and also no idea was totally useless. It equipped me with the skills necessary to excel in a fast place workplace. It was an all hands on deck drilling.
We had practical training on a variety of topics ranging from strategic thinking where we developed hypothetical strategies using a few companies as case study (such as Jumia), developed objective key results, establishing metrics, resources and activities on how to actualize set objectives.
There was also the design thinking sessions. I liked this session because it made me understand that for a product to be successful, the consumers or users had to be able to connect and engage with the product. We went through the ideation phase, narrowed down our solutions to a potential solution, created a visual prototype of the solution using the whiteboard app, which was later transferred to Balsamiq and Fluid.
Of course there was the Hackathon. I think this was the highlight of the training as we came up with great ideas to solving problems using innovative technological solutions at such a short period of time. We pitched for the very first time; it was great and educating. We got great feedback from our judges from Harvard, fine-tuned our pitch deck, and entered the Lagos Urban Innovation Challenge. Wemade it to the second stage of the competition.
We had lots of great guest speakers who lectured us further, giving us real life situations examples, success stories as well as setback stories. Some of these speakers included:
Anaji Sastry – Lecturer at MIT Sloan
Adekunbi Oyelade – Founder at Sesawa
Vivian Nwakah – Founder at Medsaf
George Xing – Head of Analytics at Lyft
Martin Curtis – Head of performance agencies Google
Gbenga Oyebode – Founder Aluko & Oyebode
Remah Kasule – Founder CEDA International.
Prior to the training, I used to think that a negative feedback meant you were not good and that you could not be accepted but I got to understand that a negative feedback is a way of telling you that you can do better and be the best at what you do. Also, I got to understand that mistakes present an opportunity for learning and growth.
Moving forward, I hope to apply all I have learnt to all aspects of life, keep pushing, and never giving up.
The world belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams – Eleanor Roosevelt