Co-founder & CEO of @Cc_HUB. Fueled by my quest for a more competitive Nigeria through knowledge application. Participant - THNK. Amsterdam School of Creative Leadership
Report: Tech-In Governance
The maiden edition of the Tech-In Series took place on 24th – 26th of March 2011 at the Pan African University, Victoria Island campus Lagos. The 48hr experiment gathered geeks and designers with stakeholders from different walks of life to co-create novel web and mobile based solutions aimed at empowering citizen to contribute to good governance through citizen participation.
The open and temporary living lab was powered by intense collaboration where participants worked passionately to transform six back of the envelope ideas into working prototypes of social web and mobile based tools for better governance in Nigeria. While the projects and teams were centrally selected and allocated, the team’s ability to self-organise led to a successful experiment.
The Co-creation Hub team spent a significant amount of time planning and organising the unusual event behind the scene between December 2010 and March 2011. However, the organisation was mainly to ensure an enabling environment where the individual team could freely engage and organise for result. The gathering obviously thus demonstrates the power of crowd and how a well supported co-creation process can lead to well thought out solutions. Even with meagre resources, collective intelligence when properly harnessed proved invaluable at the end of the event.
The winner, “Residents’ Report” is a managed platform which allows citizens to point local problems to public institutions responsible to aid prompt fixing. The runner-up was “BudgIT”, a web platform for user-friendly presentation of state and federal budget to include charts and performance analysis for proper understanding of what budget entails. The 2nd runner-up “Project Watch”, is a project monitoring system which allows citizens to certify the execution of public projects.
I believe it is appropriate for me to claim that the investment in this series has been good value for money and I would like to say a special thank you to Indigo Trust, Enterprise Development Centre, Main One Cable and Funmobile. The viability of Tech-In Series of course is dependent on whether some of the projects turn into sustainable social ventures but we believe the commitment of the partners towards nurturing and mentoring the team will provide a strong driving force.
Beyond the immediate challenges being addressed by Tech-In Series, the impact of the initiative will demonstrate the importance of knowledge application for economic prosperity in Nigeria.
Let’s throw knowledge at our problems, facilitate innovation and encourage entrepreneurs to generate value from it all for the benefit of our society at large.
Nigeria Beyond Elections 2011…transforming citizen participation in governance through tech innovation
The biggest issue in Nigeria at the moment is the 2011 elections. This is an opportunity and a pivotal moment to engage citizens in the governance of the country. While we work towards ensuring that the votes count and the right leaders are elected into leadership position this year, its also important to explore how the citizens will be engaged actively beyond the elections.
Governance i believe encompasses not just government, but also the civil society, the systems, the procedures and processes in place for planning, management and decision-making. Fostering sound public judgment through engagement of citizens is thus a key instrument for better governance. While technology offers no magic solutions, the diffusion of mobile phone in Africa provides a platform through which more citizens can gain access to information while participating in development processes and decisions that affect them.
In essence, HOW DO WE MAKE DEMOCRACY AN EVERYDAY AFFAIR? Got an idea on how web/mobile platforms can be used to transform citizen participation? Then join us at Tech-In Governance.
Tech-In Governance is a 48hr gathering of ideas, people and digital tools aimed at creating novel web & mobile solutions to transform citizen participation in governance. We’ll bring together some of the best governance experts, software developers, designers, marketing communication experts and social innovators to turn 6 selected ideas into tools and social start-ups (with working prototypes) in 48hrs.
This is sure a daunting endeavour but we understand the need to start from somewhere.
To submit ideas, participate or partner Tech-In Governance, visit http://tech-in.org/index.html
Follow us on twitter @techinseries and facebook http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tech-In-Series/177017889007409?ref=ts
Nigerians Co-created Social Tools in 48hrs – harnessing the power of ‘US’
Creative minds are undoubtedly in abundance in Nigeria but many will argue the lack of enabling environment thwart their ability to harness their knowledge for the benefit of the country. However, Nigeria is not exempted from the surge in innovation being experienced across the continent with boundaries and barriers now being crushed to allow creativity and entrepreneurship flourish.
With a growing army of social and tech entrepreneurs, little is however known about how the line between collaboration and competition can be explored for value creation in this fierce market.
To test its approach, Co-creation Hub Nigeria recently adopted the Social Innovation Camp to engage Nigerians in an experiment for the creation of new ventures and social tools. With 6 ideas selected from an open call, 60 professionals from different walks of life were engaged in teams to demonstrate how collaborative problem solving can be used in creating home grown solutions.
In 48hrs, prototypes were developed and business & sustainability plans initiated. 6 highly competitive solutions were created and 3 came out of the camp as winners with cash prizes and a range of business supports services. The winner, “i-watch live” is an idea to use web and mobile to keep governments at all levels in Nigeria accountable to their mandate by tracking their activities. 2nd prize went to “my123Health“, a web and mobile based health information service while 3rd prize went to “mWanted“, a mobile based crime reporting and tracking service, supporting the Nigerian police.
Social Innovation Camp Nigeria was an eye opener and together with researchers from ENVIU – innovators in sustainability (Netherlands), a thorough analysis is being carried out on data gathered from the event to help improve our knowledge on what motivate Nigerians to participate in a Co-creation process. I’ll do an update on our findings shortly.
Also watch out for news on Tech-In Series – a quarterly unusual event aimed at harnessing the power of technology for economic development in Nigeria. Tech-In will adopt the Social Innovation Camp model to encourage tech innovation and application in select sectors in Nigeria.
See the following links for more information on Social Innovation Camp Nigeria; http://sicampnigeria.org/ and Facebook Page
Affiliations
A quick introduction to 2 interesting organisations through which my work will be deployed.
InnCite Ltd: a UK based consulting practice that seeks to accelerate enterprise competitiveness through product and process innovation. InnCite facilitates the exploitation of R&D for improved enterprise performance.
URL: www.innciteonline.com
Co-creation Hub on the other hand is a social enterprises committed to bringing together people from different sectors to work collaboratively on solutions to social problems in Nigeria.
URL: http://www.cchubnigeria.com/
More on Co-creation Hub soon.
WINNER – Open Innovation Africa Summit Ideation Competition
Yes, this is coming weeks later than planned but best late than never. This particular track will initiate the documentation of my participation at the recently concluded Open Innovation Africa Summit organised by Nokia, Cap Gemini and InfoDev – World Bank.
The event led by Nokia was one of its kind and quite ambitious. The aim was to network around 200 thought leaders in Africa ” to promote the creation of new innovation services and collaboration models, which ensure continuous alignment between different players of the innovation ecosystem as well as to embed end-user driven co-creation and open innovation as critical elements to African innovation systems.
…while i was already invited as one of the 200 thought leaders to this event, i chose to also participate in the ideation competition which was meant to identify 8 top contributors to be invited to the summit. As the title of this post suggest, I WON:-).
“Selection was based on the quality of ideas, participation and interaction on the website, and the appreciation of the issues and challenges at hand”
…and my idea? is an extension of my thinking around building a vibrant innovaton ecosystem in Africa to harness the energy behind the budding social innovation movement for economic prosperity.
Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship Platform
A platform that provides a new way of working for stakeholders (social innovators, government, businesses, through leaders e.t.c) and an opportunity to position government and businesses closer together to generate more innovative solutions to major societal and policy challenges.
By bringing together local stakeholders on Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the platform will enable the integration of a range of resources and better coordination of policy and support to harness the developments in the space for the benefit of the continent, resulting in a step change in Africa.
The objectives of the proposed platform are as follows:
- Activating Social Innovation
- Garnering support from different sectors and policy makers for Social Innovation
- Creating Platform to fertilise and accelerate Social Innovation in Africa
- Establishing contextualised metrics and models for assessing impact of Social Innovation and – ROI (return on investment)
- Propagating a culture of seeking alternative solutions to addressing social problems
Possible initial activities of the platform:
- Thought leadership on Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Africa (context through specfic research projects and collaborative papers)
- Policy dialogues on Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship
- Entrepreneurial training and support for Social Innovators
- Building local networks of Social Innovators and their supporters and facilitating interaction within the network through events and discussion fora
- Connecting to international networks e.g Social Innovation eXchange (www.socialinnovationexchange.org) for sharing of best case practices and insights
- Lead the establishment of a SOCIAL INNOVATION FUND for inventors (drawing resources from a wide range of stakeholders including companies, government andd international donors)
- Build and test models and metrics for assessing impact of Social Innovation and returns
…and lastly the rationale for this platform:
The popularity of social enterprise – business with social mission – is surging and the number of social enterprises is growing around the world. But its hard enough to start a successful business; founding a social enterprise that must compete in the marketplace and create social impact is an even taller order.
This growing army of socially minded entrepreneurs working at the grassroots of our society in the space between private and public sectors are creating innovative solutions to some of the world’s pressing social challenges. With increasing concerted efforts to achieve the MDGs in sustainable manner, social entrepreneurs bring innovative application of business methods to find new solutions to problems such as quality of education, combating corruption, deepening democracy, poverty alleviation, citizen engagement in governance e.t.c
To harness the energy and potentials of this movement for economic prosperity in Africa, we propose the establishment of an ecosystem to create an enabling environment for Innovation and Social Entrpreneurship to flourish in Africa (Africa Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship Platform).