“My name is Phelix Juma (and my name is Kennedy Osoya), form 3 students from Nyang’iela Mixed Secondary School. We are here to present our project: Simple Cell Phone Charging Method.” My friend Osoya and I made an introduction at the 48th National Science Congress at Matuga Girls High School in Kwale. The theme was “Science and Technology for Economic Recovery” and lots of amazing innovations were being presented by young ambitious high school students all over the country. We were the first (and sadly still the last as of today) to make it to the National Science Congress from my school and this meant so much not just to us but also to the school so we did every research we could to prepare for this day. We learned deep details about the inventions of the likes of Faraday, Fleming, Orsted, Lenz, Maxwell, Becquerel and Einstein. Our main aim was not to come up with another mass-energy equivalence; Einstein, Lorentz and Poincare had done a lot of work there and their findings had been proved to be working well; our focus was to use these inventions to come up with a cheap and simple method that people could use to not only charge their phones but also replace the paraffin lighting back in the village — a hitherto expensive and inaccessible service.
So yesterday we went to the Nairobi Innovation Week and I have to confess that most of what I did see there being presented as “innovations” fall short of the definition of innovation. Let’s revisit basic English for a minute; novelty is defined simply as something new, creation as something new and valuable, invention as something new, having potential through utility and innovation as something new and uniquely useful. The ladder is such that we have novelty, creation and invention but without innovation, all these things mean nothing to humanity other than being the result of genius thoughts. The invention of the microprocessor was such a genius thing, the wheel was an important invention but it is what we have done with the wheel and the microprocessor that counts and that matters. A microprocessor is just another piece of a circuit board but through innovation, we have made use of it to power the information revolution epoch. That is the power of innovation; it is not about coming up with the theory of relativity but making use of the theory of relativity to maneuver our way into space; it is about using the power of computers to power social media platforms, e-commerce platforms, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, internet of things, VR/AR and all the other amazing innovations that have littered this epoch.
Innovation is about coming up with something new and uniquely useful.
I was a student at The University of Nairobi when we had the first Nairobi Innovation Week. It was a revolutionary idea coordinated by Dr. Tony Omwansa, one of our greatest mentors then. The reason I remember this first event is because of Eng. George Ouma who developed a way to have mobile phones charge themselves as we used them. When my friend, Ascon Kamili, told us about this, I was skeptical. “This seems to violate the laws of Physics — it is like a Perpetual Power Machine which is scientifically impossible.” I remember saying, until George shared a video of a phone self-charging whenever he was using it. That was a revolutionary achievement and it showed just how much can come out of the smart minds we have in this country.
I remember the second Nairobi Innovation Week because we participated in it as presenters (from the university’s C4DLab). Our innovation, a social media platform that connected people based on their interests, was a national sensation. Older population had somehow grown out of touch with Facebook because of the largely irrelevant posts on their walls and so we were here at their rescue, or at least we thought we were, and so when I went to the tent walking stall after stall, it brought back old memories. Seeing people passionately talk about their ideas and startups is one of the most amazing things but I couldn’t help but wonder: Why do we need another school information management system? How did project xyz even get a chance to come for this presentation, does it even qualify to be called an innovation? Going back to the 48thNational Congress, I remember most projects being shut off as being copy cats — if there is a good phrase to use for the presentations I saw at the NIW, then copy-cat would be a euphemistic phrase. I mean this is the Nairobi Innovation Week and we deserve to see the best innovations, we deserve to see the value these innovations stand to create, we deserve to see unique useful valuebeing offered and that is currently not being offered by any existing systems, we deserve to see innovations not copy cats.
Creativity and skills alone cannot help us come up with innovations. To come up with an innovation, we need clear understanding of the problem we want to solve; hence it would be correct to say that innovations come from problems. We encounter a problem and we seek to find a solution in the simplest way possible because either there isn’t any solution currently or the existing ones need improvement.
In the dot com era, we saw people like Elon and Thiel team up to make payments easier and specifically possible online. Visa existed then but people could not transact online using Visa and so Elon, Thiel and their team came up with PayPal — an innovative solution that would allow people to make payments online. Jeff Bezos wanted a way to make purchase of books easier and no easier way existed other than to use the internet and so Amazon was born. The website got large and it was hard to find information so Yahoo came up with a search engine but it was a bunch of crappy algorithms — Larry and Sergey saw an opportunity to improve the algorithm to build a better search engine and so Google was born. We could do a lot of things online but we couldn’t interact with each other; MySpace was born but soon fell out of favor with the users; Zuck, having been tipped off by the Winklevos brothers, saw an opportunity to build the next generation social media platform we now call Facebook. But even when we thought innovation had come to a stop in the social media platform, Systrom realized that people needed to share photos and so they built Instagram which got over 25,000 downloads from App Store on its first day. Spiegel and Murphy would later realize that with the age of monitoring, we needed disappearing messages and so SnapChat was born but before we could come close to closing the chapter, Jan Koum wanted a better and faster way to communicate on mobile phones, just like we did via SMS but faster, cheaper and cooler; we now have WhatsApp thanks to Koum’s creative idea to create a unique useful value that would solve the problem of chatting. When we thought space-travel was a task only meant for governments, Elon Musk, using the money he got from the sale of PayPal to eBay, changed our minds when he founded Space Exploration Technologies (popularly, SpaceX); but he had something up his sleeves; make rocket boosters renewable and by so doing, the cost of travelling to space would be significantly lowered.
I could go on and on to mention hundreds of names of my favorite innovators but time and space wouldn’t let me. I believe you do get my point;
An innovation is a solution aimed at offering a unique solution to a problem.
It doesn’t matter how you do it; it doesn’t even have to be in technology (sorry I work in the tech space so that’s where my examples come from) — James Mwangi revolutionized banking in Africa — his idea of agency banking and successfully rolling it in Kenya and beyond is one of the most innovative solutions in the banking sector. This list cannot be concluded without the mention of M-PESA whose revolution of the mobile money industry speaks for itself and I wouldn’t want to water down.
Could it be true that our population has gone on an innovation recession? Why do we have, as the best, copy-cat projects being presented as “innovations” in the country’s most prestigious innovation event? The London Tech Week is upcoming and it would be my pleasure to travel and see what they’ve got (I wouldn’t be travelling). Every year I follow the Techcrunch Disrupt Events and the amazing innovations that people present there prove to me that the world isn’t in an innovation recession.
What Kenya needs are policies that encourage and promote innovation. This spans from educational policies that encourage skill-based curriculum as opposed to grades-based curriculum. The grades-based curriculum is a major killer to innovation in our colleges; seldom will you find a student who has the time to read all the books about outdated technology and revise all past papers since 2004 just to prepare well to pass the exams and at the same time, stay equipped with the knowledge of the current trends in technology — something that’s particularly important to coming up with innovative solutions.
Grades-based as oppossed to skills-based curriculum is killing our ability to innovate.
The business environment that encourages easy trade is also very important. What comes to your mind when you hear the names: George Westinghouse, Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla? All of them were amazing engineers, all of them were inventors, all of them were innovators. Besides these great names, we remember The Westinghouse Electric Corporation and General Electric; companies that were built by Westinghouse and Edison respectively. We also remember the war of the currents in which Westinghouse, siding with Tesla, won. To Tesla, this was a fight about whose idea was better but to Edison and Westinghouse, this was a business fight. Westinghouse’s company closed business in 1999 but GE is still strong and running. Tesla later lived a modest life, some would say a poor life, I would say a miserable ending of a life while his innovations and patents generated lots of money for Edison. This is simply because Edison and Westinghouse, unlike Tesla, saw the importance of commercializing their innovations; they knew that without a strong business case and enough money, there was just no way to make more electric bulbs or motors or generators. JP Morgan was there to help them with the financing and what has become of GE is here for all of us to see.
An invention can survive without being monetized but an innovation cannot — that is why focusing on the business model of the innovation is more important than the innovation itself. It took Facebook 4 years to be able to start making some good money and this was after Zuck hired Sandberg to help with the business model implementation. It took Amazon nearly 14 years to be able to make its first profits, Uber is yet to be profitable, SnapChat is yet to be profitable but they are dependent on investor money to keep running — investors who see huge potential in their business models and this will surely one day pay off as it did when Amazon, Facebook and Google started making profits. That is why we need a good investment ecosystem in Kenya that can help push the amazing innovations we have into the market — I remember George had tough times pushing his innovation due to a lack of enough funds and investors were hard to come by. The story is not different when it comes to countless number of innovators that I know of. You cannot build a cell phone self-charging device if you do not have enough money to build it or pay your staff — that means you either have to get investment money or have a strong business model that will ensure you generate money to support the business. The former is better as you start — I could loosely say were it not for JP Morgan’s money, we couldn’t have light bulbs today (hopefully without committing a logical fallacy).
Without a strong business case and enough money, there was just no way to make more electric bulbs or motors or generators. That’s why we must look at the business side of our innovations. Passion does not pay bills.
While working on MealTime, we learned this the hard way. We had a staff of around 7 people and their total monthly remuneration plus the office rent and office operational costs plus marketing costs were too high to be supported with the meagre revenue the business was generating. The business was starting to pick up when the election period set in and most people had to travel home and our active userbase literally went to zero. After the elections, we again started to gain traction but soon after came the demonstrations around Anniversary Towers and along Moi Avenue; our office was at Hazina Towers and most of our hotels were along Moi Avenue meaning our business logistics was directly affected and for months, our active user base went down again. We were also quickly running out of cash and we had lots of debt in unpaid remunerations. At the end we had to close business and spin-off to something new. That is just an example of our personal experience with how political atmosphere affects business operations and most importantly, how it played a part in killing our startup.
Many people have similar stories when it comes to their startups; I have seen lots of founders wrapping up things to go back to employment and make some money to be able to come back after years of chasing investors who favor mostly the white-owned startups as opposed to the local startups (subject for another day). When it comes to the importance of having enough capital to run the business as you work on your business model and revenue generation schemes, I would ask my friend Benerd from Onesha to write an article and help us understand this broad topic. I believe that innovators need to be prepared for the harsh environment in the startup field. It is not a walk in the park; dropping out of college and becoming as rich as Mark Zuckerberg overnight; the reality is harsher than you think and only people like me who have endured it for 6 years now understand what this means. Sharing that experience is important to help others understand what awaits them and hence find ways to maneuver through the challenges.
KUZA LAB, the company we co-founded to help us partner with promising startups and provide them with the technical expertise required to build a market-ready product, has become instrumental in advising our partners on what we feel should be the best approach to the market based on our experience.
Knowing this challenge very well, I decided to ask the representative at Gearbox why they are growing at such a slow pace and he gave me information that was not absolutely new to me. A machine costs them half a million but people want to print their PCBs at low costs — most of the people, myself included, find the average KES 1000 they charge for a medium-sized PCB to be quite high. At the same time, they don’t have lots of customers as most locals prefer to have their PCBs printed overseas in China where it costs much less. Another challenge he mentioned was the cost of production — lots of tax to import the machines, lots of operational and maintenance costs while at the same time, they do not enjoy the economies of large scale. As a matter of fact, they do not have lots of machines and that means their production pace is slow and as such cannot produce products on mass scale — this means that for a large-scale customer, having the designs printed in China is the only alternative. The success of IoT industry in Kenya depends on companies like Gearbox being able to operate in large scale otherwise we will continue buying IoT products from China to install in our country. Why are we killing our own startups? Why can’t the government make policies that promote companies like Gearbox to do better and help make Kenya an industrial state? The Chinese governments lobby for their companies to do business in other countries but our government works hard to ensure local companies don’t survive in our own country.
The success of IoT industry in Kenya depends on companies like Gearbox being able to operate in large scale so that we can do the entire process within our country.
I know this post has focused mostly on the negative sides but in full honesty, there are a number of projects that were amazing. There were these students from Shree Cutchi Leva Patel (SCLP) Samaj school who were presenting about the use of garbage waste to build material with strong tensile, shear and compression strength that it could withstand the weight of lorry — a material as strong as concrete; it is an amazing waste management mechanism. What amazed me was these kids’ mastery of material science concepts and yet they are still in high school.
It wasn’t the first time I was encountering SCLP Samaj school. In 2010 during the 48thNational Science Congress, SCLP Samaj School students beat us in the top three (they scooped all the three awards) in our category — Technology Talk. I was mesmerized by the projects these students were presenting and after they presented their project to us at the NIW, I had to remind them of what they did to us in 2010 (on a light note) to which they responded by thanking the amazing mentoring of their teachers. This is the kind of mentoring that all students should get so that we churn out of school people who are capable of seeing problems and instead of complaining about them, they create solutions for them. Schools need not do benchmarking at Maranda to gain tips on how to pass exams but rather, benchmark with SCLP Samaj on how to nurture innovative and thoughtful students.
Innovation is not about coming up with something new, it is not about complex mathematics of quantum Physics or Hawking radiation from a black hole’s event horizon, it is simply about coming up with a unique and useful solution to a problem — the simpler the better. I would like to invite all of us to participate and together we can solve the problems facing Africa. We have the knowledge, we have the skills, we have the expertise. What we need is hunger and thirst to solve these problems. As the late Steve Jobs concluded to Stanford University Students during his commencement speech way back in 2005, “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish” so will I conclude to us all: Stay Hungry; Stay Foolish.
Never be satisfied, and always push yourself. Be willing to keep trying the things people say cannot be done.Be ready to step out of your comfort zone. Be willing to come up with unique useful solutions to the problems you face in your daily life.
