A workshop on product innovation for African entrepreneurs

Carnegie Mellon University’s Integrated Innovation Institute and CMU-Africa’s Industry Innovation Lab (IIL) teamed up this past summer for the inaugural IIL Product Innovation Workshop. The workshop took place from August 5-9 at the College of Engineering’s location in Kigali, Rwanda.

The IIL Product Innovation Workshop was designed for tech startup entrepreneurs in Africa. Stanley Mukasa, associate director of entrepreneurship, explains that IIL decided to partner with the Integrated Innovation Institute because of the need that he saw for entrepreneurs at CMU-Africa to learn more about product innovation.

"We decided to create a five-day workshop aimed at taking these entrepreneurs through the entire process of the thinking behind the products, the markets, the clients," Mukasa explains. "Covering the actual design process, the factors put into conducting market research to understand the entire process, and then leading to the final solution design and presentation."

The workshop hosted about 50 participants who are all primarily founders of their own startups. The group came from 12 countries in Africa. Throughout the workshop, participants engaged in a number of hands-on exercises, facilitated by Integrated Innovation Institute’s Peter Boatwright and Ellen Ayoob.

"We weren't just lecturing," says Boatwright, director of the Integrated Innovation Institute. "Our sessions were highly experiential, and we also dialogued about how to innovate and work across the continent. There's a lot of commonalities, as well as individual differences, across Africa."

This extremely diverse range of both participants and leaders required Boatwright, Ayoob, and Mukasa, along with Maria Mayanja, IIL program manager, to curate the workshop to be universally relevant to all African entrepreneurs.

With cultural differences in mind, the workshop’s main exercise had participants develop solutions for city transportation issues, a problem that not only affects the host city Kigali, but several other cities across the continent as well. Participants were tasked with going out into the city to conduct field research, identifying people stranded on the city streets in the early morning and late evening hours of the day. Doing so gave the participants an idea of what potential consumers might need, before they began developing solutions.

"We were really careful to pick an activity that allowed the entrepreneurs to research consumer insights," explains Ayoob, program director in the Integrated Innovation Institute. "This activity also created more opportunities for cross-cultural collaboration. Each team had to have someone who spoke the native language of Kinyarwanda, so that they were able to help translate in the field."

"It changed perspectives dramatically, because they realized the importance of hearing verbatim, seeing the eyes of the other person, and they realized how much more information they're getting than sitting at their desks," says Boatwright.

All parties agreed that the workshop was a success. Ideally they would like to make this workshop an annual event, covering different topics and expanding their reach. Mukasa reported that the workshop was also a great networking opportunity for the participants, as doors have been opened for these startups within the African continent to collaborate and potentially even open up new markets. Mukasa also mentioned that about 40 percent of the participants were women, two of whom began their own training program to help other women entrepreneurs in Africa.

"That ripple effect is growing, and we want to be part of that by also supporting them to implement training and other programs they're doing," says Mukasa.