The SEED Africa Symposium is an annual international forum for sharing knowledge and experience, establishing partnerships, and developing solutions to stimulate the growth of social and eco-entrepreneurship across the African continent.
The 2016 topic was From Innovation to Imitation and brought together around 500 enterprises, researchers, practitioners, investors, policy makers and representatives of the civil society to discuss how we could collaboratively utilize the replication of business models for successfully contributing to green growth and sustainable development in Africa.
AFRIT Founder, Ndubuisi Ekekwe, spoke in SEED Africa Symposium 2016. He noted that Africa must look strategically in business model imitation. He emphasized that adaptation of proven business models instead of pure technology innovation model (especially from R&D) where the comparative advantages may be more challenging could help many entrepreneurs succeed. While Africa can compete on technology innovation (especially from R&D), the ecosystems remain challenging and resources needed to succeed may not be easy.
For example, an entrepreneur that wants to build medical devices could technical do so but may lack the support in Africa to create a product which can compete with global brands. For a specific entrepreneur, that creates a problem on staying in business or going bankrupt. This is the reason why Africa has many re-sellers and representatives of foreign technologies than innovators who make their own technologies. In other words, it may be a better business to be reseller of foreign medical devices in Africa than trying to spend years to make one when local government may not necessarily care if the entrepreneur succeeds.
There is nothing wrong with picking ideas from others provided the process is done legally. Imitation and replication must not just be about technology. Governments need to copy great international policies and promote them in Africa.
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